In today's fast-paced software development landscape, ensuring robust security is more challenging than ever. Organizations leverage a vast array of security tools, but this often leads to a significant problem: a fragmented view of security posture, overwhelming manual effort, and a constant battle against "alert fatigue". This is where DefectDojo steps in, revolutionizing how DevSecOps and AppSec teams manage vulnerabilities.

The Problem

Modern enterprises typically employ a multitude of security tools – one report found large enterprises use an average of 45 tools. While these tools are essential, their outputs often create "noisy data" and a sprawl of findings that are difficult to consolidate and act upon. The result is a scenario characterized by:

• Manual Triage: Security professionals spending significant time (up to 60%) on manual deduplication and sifting through reams of spreadsheets.
• Alert Fatigue: Companies averaging over 500 endpoint security alerts per week, leading to 98% of security leaders working extra hours to keep up. A staggering 63% of cyber teams spend over 4 hours weekly just on false positives.
• Fragmented Visibility: Haphazard reporting and disparate data sources make it difficult to gain a holistic and accurate risk picture across the entire environment.
• Slow Remediation: The challenge of coordinating fixes and ensuring that best practices are followed without unduly slowing down application development and deployment.

These issues highlight a critical need for a centralized, automated, and intelligent platform that can cut through the noise and enable security teams to focus on what truly matters.

What is DefectDojo?

DefectDojo is a comprehensive DevSecOps, Application Security Posture Management (ASPM), and vulnerability management tool. It acts as an open platform designed to transform security information management, bridging the gap between security strategy and informed execution for intelligent risk management. Created by security professionals for security professionals, DefectDojo aims to deliver maximum results with minimum human intervention.

DefectDojo

DevSecOps, ASPM, Vulnerability Management. All on one platform.

Key Features

DefectDojo's strength lies in its ability to centralize, automate, and intelligent process security data:

• Extensive Integrations: DefectDojo can ingest data from over 180+ security tools and platforms, including SAST, DAST, infrastructure scanners, and Software Composition Analysis (SCA). This flexibility allows users to integrate their preferred security tools.
• Universal Importer & Parser: For DefectDojo Pro users, the Universal Importer is an external tool that can build pipelines directly from the command line, offering a much faster solution than writing custom code. The Universal Parser (available in DefectDojo Pro) enables the platform to normalize data ingested from virtually any DevSecOps tool that exposes data in JSON or XML format, preventing vendor lock-in and adapting immediately to tool changes.
• Intelligent Deduplication: DefectDojo automatically distills and deduplicates vulnerabilities to a single actionable report. It can deduplicate findings across a single tool or multiple tools, ensuring only one issue per finding. The platform uses machine learning algorithms that go beyond simple string matching to identify duplicates and learn from human feedback over time, improving classification and surfacing actual threats.
• Robust Automation Capabilities: DefectDojo supports automated import pipelines via API to ingest new scans. These pipelines can take various forms, such as daily environment scans or CI/CD triggered actions. The API's /reimport endpoint can be used for both initial imports and "reimports" that extend existing tests with additional findings, and can even create new Tests, Engagements, Products, or Product Types when 'Auto-Create Context' is enabled.
• Advanced Prioritization and Risk Management: The platform provides risk-based prioritization features, factoring in exploitability, reachability, revenue, potential compliance factors, and user records to help teams identify and respond to the most pressing vulnerabilities. It integrates Threat Intelligence with an Exploit Prediction Scoring System (EPSS) to assess the probability of a specific vulnerability being exploited.
• Rules Engine (DefectDojo Pro): This feature allows teams to customize rules to automatically manipulate, edit, enhance, add custom remediation advice, escalate, or de-escalate specific findings without significant manual effort. This saves time that would otherwise be spent writing custom programs or making multiple API calls for every scan.
• Comprehensive Reporting and Dashboards: DefectDojo can compile comprehensive reports across teams, products, and business units, and create executive-level dashboards and in-depth tactical reports. DefectDojo Pro offers enhanced dashboards.
• Bidirectional Jira Sync: This feature ensures a single source of truth across both DefectDojo and Jira, simplifying the transition from vulnerability detection to remediation and allowing development teams to work in their preferred environment.

How DefectDojo Solves the Problem

DefectDojo directly addresses the challenges faced by security and DevSecOps teams by:

• Centralizing Data: It aggregates data from all security tools in one place, providing a single source of truth for a holistic and accurate risk picture. This transforms disparate security information into a unified view.
• Automating Tedious Tasks: By automating scan aggregation, comparison, review, and repetitive tasks like deduplication, DefectDojo reduces the manual effort that bogs down security professionals. This frees up valuable time and resources for higher-level strategic thinking and problem-solving.
• Reducing Noise and Alert Fatigue: The intelligent deduplication and rules engine features significantly cut down the amount of data that teams must process and assess, enabling them to focus on actual threats rather than false positives.
• Upleveling Security Performance: Through automation, real-time insights, and analytics, DefectDojo helps teams refine their security approach, leading to a more efficient and resilient DevSecOps environment.
• Enhancing Collaboration: By providing a unified platform and consistent data, it makes it simpler for application development teams and cybersecurity professionals to collaboratively enforce best DevSecOps practices. It empowers security teams to focus on strategy, fostering seamless collaboration between development, security, and leadership.

Getting Started with DefectDojo

DefectDojo offers flexible options for quick deployment and use:

• Online Demo: You can explore DefectDojo's functionalities immediately via their publicly accessible demo server at demo.defectdojo.org. Log in with username admin and password 1Defectdojo@demo#appsec. Please note that the demo is publicly accessible and regularly reset; do not put sensitive data in the demo. An easy way to test DefectDojo is to upload some sample scan reports.
• Using Docker Compose:

# Clone the project  
git clone https://github.com/DefectDojo/django-DefectDojo  
cd django-DefectDojo

# Check if your installed toolkit is compatible  
./docker/docker-compose-check.sh

# Building Docker images  
docker compose build

# Run the application (for other profiles besides postgres-redis see  
# https://github.com/DefectDojo/django-DefectDojo/blob/dev/readme-docs/DOCKER.md)  
docker compose up -d

# Obtain admin credentials. The initializer can take up to 3 minutes to run.  
# Use docker compose logs -f initializer to track its progress.  
docker compose logs initializer | grep "Admin password:"

Your instance will typically be accessible at http://localhost:8080.

DefectDojo's API is fully documented in-app using the OpenAPI framework, allowing users to test API calls with various parameters using their own API Token, which is helpful for script development and integrations.

The Business Impact

Organizations implementing DefectDojo typically see significant improvements in several key areas:

• Enhanced Efficiency: The platform significantly boosts security team productivity by automating manual tasks, allowing them to scale their operations without proportional increases in staffing.
• Reduced Operational Costs: By streamlining workflows and enabling teams to achieve more with fewer resources, DefectDojo can lead to substantial cost savings for the organization.
• Stronger Risk Posture: Providing a unified, distilled, and prioritized view of vulnerabilities enables organizations to focus on fixing critical issues at the right time. The ability to analyze trends allows for more informed decision-making and better overall risk management.
• Increased Scalability: Designed to process millions of findings from hundreds of tools, DefectDojo ensures that security programs can grow and adapt to expanding environments without becoming overwhelmed.
• Strategic Focus: By automating repetitive and time-consuming tasks, DefectDojo empowers security teams to shift their attention from routine operations to higher-value strategic initiatives, such as improving security architecture and fostering a proactive security culture.

Conclusion

DefectDojo stands out as a powerful and flexible platform for DevSecOps orchestration and vulnerability management. Born out of a deep understanding of the frustrations in cybersecurity, it provides a crucial solution for consolidating, automating, and intelligently managing security findings from a diverse ecosystem of tools.

Through its comprehensive integrations, intelligent deduplication, and robust automation features like the Rules Engine and API-driven pipelines, DefectDojo enables organizations to overcome alert fatigue, streamline remediation efforts, and achieve unprecedented levels of efficiency and scalability. Its commitment to open-source software also makes robust cybersecurity accessible to organizations of all sizes, contributing to a safer digital landscape for everyone.

By implementing DefectDojo, businesses can transform their AppSec and DevSecOps processes, leading to a more secure, efficient, and collaborative environment that truly fixes what matters.