ASW Recap for June 2026

June brings us the summer solstice, leading to shorter days and longer nights.

There’s also an appsec solstice, except things just get longer – lists of CVEs, top ten lists, lists of JavaScript frameworks, lists of AI frameworks.

And the only kinds of days that get shorter are the number that appsec requires for patching vulns.

Maybe we spend too much time chasing bugs in the dark instead of illuminating better designs.

BadHost, Dead CTFs, Exploding NPMs, and the Verizon DBIR (ep. 385)

We kick off the month with an episode dedicated to appsec news since we ran so many interviews from RSAC at the end of May.

Kalyani Pawar stops by to talk about the parsing problems that led to the BadHost vuln, which exposed tons of LLMs, MCPs, and agents to potential compromise. Then we wonder where to look for security education and practice as more and more LLMs infiltrate the camaraderie of the CTF community.

We talk about the tradeoffs in trust between using public packages vs. having agents write replacements from scratch. In other words, do you reuse an open source solution that’s already addressed your needs? Or do you burn tokens to re-implement a solution from scratch? The situation isn’t quite that dichotomy of decisions, but so many people are looking for excuses to have agents write code that avoiding packages has been a topic of conversation.

Finally, we examine a few appsec details from the Verizon DBIR that reveal how attackers are compromising orgs – and how orgs should use that information to protect themselves.

Scanner Results Are a Starting Point. Here's What Comes Next. (ep. 386)

Most AppSec teams are working through more findings than their teams can validate. But that already feels like a losing proposition and a bad strategy, especially when dealing with dependencies. It’s just a form of BugOps – chasing CVEs because they’re a quantity that can be tracked and reduced.

Somewhere in that process are a few vulns worth worrying about, the ones that are actually exploitable in production with consequences you should care about. This conversation with Federico Kirschbaum explores why automated testing often stops short of the hardest part of the job: proving priority.

We dig into how business logic flaws and authorization vulnerabilities get missed by tools that scan without reasoning, what exploit validation looks like at runtime, and how security engineers are (slowly) preferring to filter findings to those that developers should actually act on.

The segment is sponsored by XBOW.

Why Does It Matter Who or What Created the Code? (ep. 387)

Agents and LLMs are creating and reviewing code. They're a new tool to help developers write software and they're a new abstraction layer for expressing what code should do.

But if we're focused on determining whether code is secure, where do we focus our attention on ensuring a secure outcome?

Matias Madou talks about the challenges of finding metrics and developing benchmarks to help answer these questions. We walk through many of the questions we'd like to see answered and our desire to see appsec finally shift out of a BugOps-style find-and-fix mode into a future of secure design.

How AI Is Reshaping Identity Security at the Infrastructure Layer (ep. 388)

Appsec has seen machine identities from daemons and processes to services, microservices, and cloud accounts. And now we have agents.

Ev Kontsevoy talks about what it means to have engineers and agents interacting in an environment, and why a focus on actions is more effective than roles.

One of the biggest challenges in securing agents alongside all of the other identities that organizations manage is how fragmented that management has become. But a unified engineering view of identities is just a start. Once you're able to shift to a practice where access is granted based on attributes and limited durations, then your environment becomes more resilient to mistakes and unexpected actions, not to mention the security concerns that arise with agents acting on their own.

Reducing Attack Surface & Evaluating Efficiency in Agents (ep. 389)

Squidbleed reveals another vuln that's been lurking for decades, but its real lesson is in managing a codebase’s attack surface. Regardless of whatever programming language you use, removing code is one of the best security steps you can take, followed by changing default configs to turn off uncommon features and ancient protocols.

The Linux kernel's removal of strncpy is another example of managing attack surface by replacing a notoriously misused and ambiguous function with more specific versions that better match the developers intent. It was a six-year journey for the kernel, but one that should remove a class of vulns and, importantly, improve performance.

Then it's on to agents as Tyler Shields and I discuss the newly released OWASP AISVS and yet another example of evaluating LLMs as code reviewers.

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