By Gologic, in collaboration with GitHub.

Did you know that the number of cyberattacks has increased 16-fold since 2021, reaching 1224 cases in 2024 at Hydro-Québec? Application security has never been as crucial as it will be in 2025.

In a joint webinar organized by Gologic, GitHub, and Les Affaires, experts Julien Dort (DevSecOps Consultant, Gologic), Sébastien Bernard (DevOps Consultant, Gologic), and Shawn Kelley (Enterprise Sales – Application Security, GitHub) shared their perspectives on current application security challenges and the GitHub Advanced Security solution.

This innovative tool, combined with the power of the Copilot generative AI, can transform your application security challenges into competitive advantages.

Discover the key points of this webinar in this article:

• The security challenges for developers in 2025
• The five essential pillars for an effective security strategy
  • The three categories of tools to secure your applications
• How GitHub Advanced Security can help developers
• The new features of GitHub Advanced Security for 2025
• The current context of application security in 2025

The Current Context of Application Security in 2025

According to Julien Dort, 2024-2025 marks a decisive turning point in the field of computer security. With COVID-19, companies massively invested in IT and recruitment. Now, they want these investments to be profitable and are focusing on IT security to protect themselves from online threats.

Investments have increased at the same rate as threats…

Faced with this rise in cyber threats, companies must redouble their efforts to develop their own cybersecurity skills, both in terms of protection and attack detection. At the same time, the technical debt accumulated over the years continues to represent a major challenge for organizations, making security management even more complex and demanding.

Faced with these growing challenges, it is crucial to adopt a comprehensive and structured approach to software security.

The Five Pillars of Software Security

Building an effective security strategy relies on five fundamental aspects, as explained by Julien Dort.

• Data protection, ensuring the confidentiality and integrity of sensitive information.
• Resistance to attacks, both at the application and infrastructure levels, including protection against denial-of-service attacks and other emerging threats.
• Compliance with standards and regulatory requirements, encompassing good development practices, security standards, and legal requirements specific to Quebec and Canada.
• Minimization of vulnerabilities, requiring continuous monitoring and effective remediation mechanisms.
• Facilitated risk management, thanks to a complete system including alerts, intervention procedures, and activity logs for in-depth investigations in the event of an incident.

The Three Categories of Tools to Secure Your Applications

In the webinar, our experts also emphasized the crucial importance of a structured security approach for the development of modern applications. This approach largely relies on the use of three complementary categories of tools, each providing a unique and essential perspective for identifying and mitigating vulnerabilities at different stages of the software development lifecycle.

These categories work together to offer comprehensive and robust security coverage, adapted to the complex challenges of contemporary application environments.

• Software Composition Analysis (SCA): In-depth analysis of software dependencies to identify potential vulnerabilities present in third-party components.
• Static Application Security Testing (SAST): Meticulous examination of source code to identify potential vulnerabilities, relying on recognized databases such as CVE, CWE, and OWASP.
• Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST): Testing the application under real-world usage conditions to discover vulnerabilities that might escape static analysis.

This combination of tools makes it possible to adopt a defense-in-depth strategy, essential for facing current threats, and the GitHub Advanced Security platform addresses the first two categories, SCA and SAST. And, this is precisely what the next section will address.

GitHub Advanced Security: A Complete Solution for DevSecOps Security

As our trainers explained, GitHub Advanced Security offers a multi-faceted approach to securing your code and development processes. On the one hand, it protects your secrets (API keys, passwords, etc.) by preventing their accidental disclosure in your repositories thanks to the “Push Protection” feature. On the other hand, it automates the management of your projects’ dependencies, ensuring that they are always up-to-date and free of known vulnerabilities. Moreover, according to GitHub, this feature has already detected more than 700,000 secrets within thousands of private repositories, demonstrating its effectiveness.

In addition to these two pillars, GitHub Advanced Security offers a comprehensive set of features to strengthen the security of your code, including:

• Automatic scans for source code security vulnerabilities
• Auto-fix: correction proposal for known source code vulnerabilities
• Integration of results from other tools, e.g., SonarQube, Snyk, Aquasec, etc.
• Creation of custom rules to protect against issues specific to an organization
• Native integration with GitHub Actions and Azure DevOps
• Detection of secrets in source code and prevention of password leaks
• Mechanism to reduce false positives in security alerts
• Static analysis, alert, and protection against vulnerable dependencies
• Automatic updating of minor versions of dependencies with vulnerabilities

New Features and Perspectives of GitHub Advanced Security

These significant advances pave the way for ambitious new features. Shawn Kelley presented major innovations that strengthen the position of GitHub Advanced Security. Notably, two key elements for security: an enterprise-level security configuration that facilitates policy management, and a free assessment program that reveals risk exposure points, particularly concerning secrets.

In addition, support for the Rust language, expected in beta within the next 45 days, responds to a growing demand for this language recognized for its robustness and security. The introduction of a customizable campaigns API and a delegated alert validation system allows for increased control over the vulnerability resolution process.

Finally, GitHub Advanced Security is looking to the future with promising perspectives:

• Detection and correction of code quality
• Integration of third-party tools for automatic correction
• Use of artificial intelligence for vulnerability detection in the development environment.

Conclusion: Towards a Proactive Approach to Application Security and DevSecOps

Faced with the imperative of application security in today’s digital landscape, GitHub Advanced Security proves to be a pillar for companies wishing to adopt a proactive and integrated approach. At Gologic, we understand that the implementation of such solutions goes beyond the simple deployment of tools. This is why we offer GitHub Advanced Security training that is much more than just technical learning.

To discover how our GitHub Advanced Security training and support approach can strengthen your security posture and accelerate your DevOps transformation, contact the experts at Gologic.

By Gologic, in collaboration with GitHub.