OWASP 2025 Global AppSec EU

The exponentially growing number of software security vulnerabilities and data breaches highlights a persistent gap between the implementation of the secure development lifecycle and particularly secure coding practices and their intended outcomes. Despite significant financial investments in application security and the advancements in secure software development methodologies, the effectiveness of these practices remains inconsistent. Our session is based on a multi-phase and multi-year research, conducted in two global enterprise software companies and explores how a combination of developers' security education, organizational security climate, and metrics can enhance secure coding performance and reduce software vulnerabilities.

In December 2004, Steve Lipner introduced to the world the trustworthy computing security development lifecycle. A framework which included three main pillars: Requirements for repeatable secure development processes, requirements for engineers secure coding education and requirements for measurements and accountability for software security. Guided by this three-pillar framework , our research emphasizes the under-addressed areas of developer education and organizational accountability and measurements.

Through a series of three studies, conducted in two global software companies and led by the University of Haifa in Israel, this session will present the results of an academic research that made an attempt to identify the root cause for the ever increasing number of software security vulnerabilities and investigates the effectiveness of secure coding training, the impact of organizational security climate interventions, and the correlation between security climate and secure coding performance in order to evaluate whether the later two, which were prominently left in the shades, could provide a solution to the problem.

The first study evaluates the efficacy of secure coding training programs, revealing that while training improves knowledge, it fails to significantly to reduce newly introduced vulnerabilities. The second study demonstrates that targeted organizational interventions, including leadership communication and process improvements, significantly enhance organizational security climate. The final study found significant correlation between positive security climate and secure coding performance improvement, evidenced by a higher ratio of mitigated vulnerabilities.

This research provides actionable insights for both academia and industry. It underscores the importance of integrating secure coding education with organizational climate improvements to achieve measurable security outcomes. The findings offer a comprehensive approach to reducing cyber security risks while advocating for a dual focus on technical skills and cultural transformation within software development environments.

Security champion programs are all the rage right now, but they aren’t a magic bullet; they are a lot of work and more than half of them fail. We want to scale our security programs and improve security culture and communication, but what happens when are champions are less-than-enthused? There’s no support from management? We can’t get enough buy in? Let’s look at when things go WRONG with security champions programs, with this list of WORST practices, and how to avoid each one.

Security teams increasingly take a collaborative, partnership-based approach to securing their applications and organizations. Scaling these efforts requires thoughtfully distributing awareness and ownership of security risk. Scorecarding is used at leading companies to make security posture visible, actionable, and engaging across the entire organization.

In this session, we’ll dive into how companies like Netflix, Chime, GitHub, and DigitalOcean use scorecarding to distribute security ownership, drive continuous improvement, and align risk management with business goals. You’ll walk away with practical, tool-agnostic strategies for implementing your own scorecarding program that not only enhances security posture but fosters a culture of shared responsibility and proactive risk management.

“What gets measured, gets managed” is perhaps an over-simplification, but the quote has its merits. In terms of building an effective application security Program, measurement and metrics go a long way, and by collecting, observing, and presenting actionable AppSec metrics, you can bridge the gap between Security Engineering and leadership’s strategic priorities.

In this session, we will start by speaking about different types of metrics, both qualitative and quantitative, and how these metrics can be categorised to align better with frameworks defining application security Metrics as a required control.
From there, we will start to look at what metrics we should use and how they can be visualised. By visualising these metrics, we can come to conclusions around whether or not the application security program is effective and what we should do to drive improvement.

Last, but not least, we’ll talk about how the data and visualisations can support us in our communication with leadership by supporting our requests and recommendations based on data and looking at trends.

In many areas of life—application security included—what gets measured can be proven, and what gets proven can be improved.

Listen in on how a big energy company from Norway runs a Security Champion Network with 250+ members! Ever wondered about the struggles of managing a 3-year-old network?

This light-hearted talk will give you context on:
- What the AppSec team does in Equinor.
- How our Security Champion program is structured.
- What we've learned so far.
- What challenges we've faced and how we have tried to solve them.
- Our gamification strategy.
- Key take-aways.

You will (hopefully) gain inspiration to bring home on how to run or improve your own Security Champion Network.