Qualys TotalAppSec Delivers AI-powered Unified Application Risk Management for Modern Web Apps and APIs
“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” – This adage rings truer than ever in the world of cybersecurity.
Today, the modern attack surface has exploded, fueled by APIs that now drive 83% of all web traffic, powering critical integrations, microservices, and digital experiences. Security teams are left in the dark as developers introduce APIs at an exponential pace, creating blind spots. Organizations are fighting shadow APIs, misconfigured endpoints as well as operational complexity of fragmented tools that fail to deliver a unified picture of risk.
This is where Qualys TotalAppSec changes the game. By unifying web application scanning, API security, and web malware detection under one AI-powered solution, TotalAppSec equips organizations to measure, communicate, and eliminate risks across their entire application attack surface.
Web Apps and APIs: The Expanding Attack Surface
In cybersecurity, risk is a moving target. While new-age technology drives innovation, it also expands the attack surface in ways that can be both quantified and strategically mitigated.
Web applications remain the top entry point for breaches – 68% involving third-party risks like the human element and 32% linked to ransomware, often delivered through compromised web apps and APIs. Adding to this complexity, APIs now dominate internet traffic, but their ubiquity makes them prime targets, as evident by countless breaches that exploited APIs.
With the global cost of a breach at $4.88 million, organizations face a critical challenge, underscoring the financial impact of failing to secure web applications and APIs. Compounded by 55-day remediation delays, cybercriminals exploit this window of opportunity.
As organizations adopt multi-cloud environments and embrace rapid development cycles, the question isn’t if cybercriminals will target their web apps and APIs—it’s when.
Top Challenges Faced by Security Leaders
Security leaders face a triad of challenges that undermine their ability to manage application risk effectively.
1. Lack of Visibility into Unknown and Shadow Web Apps & APIs
The lack of visibility into shadow and forgotten APIs leaves organizations exposed to risks. With 300+ APIs per enterprise, many go undocumented, bypassing security protocols and exposing sensitive data. As Forrester highlights, without a comprehensive API inventory, you cannot defend what you cannot see—a critical challenge for modern application security.
2. Fragmented and Siloed Security Testing Tools
Disparate tools like SAST, DAST, SCA, and API security solutions operate in silos, creating fragmented workflows and limited API coverage. They fail to assess runtime threats or underlying infrastructure vulnerabilities, leaving critical security gaps. Conflicting results from different security tools and false positives waste time, delaying response and leaving risks unaddressed for weeks or months.
3. Overwhelming Vulnerabilities with No Clear Prioritization Strategy
Not all vulnerabilities are equal. Without context—how a vulnerability in one component impacts another—security teams mis-prioritize remediation. As a result, time is wasted on low-risk issues while high-risk threats remain unchecked, exposing organizations to potentially critical business disruptions amid an overwhelming volume of web app and API vulnerabilities.
These challenges are more than operational headaches; they represent a fundamental misalignment between security workflows and the rapidly evolving threat landscape.
Introducing Qualys TotalAppSec
Qualys TotalAppSec emerges as the definitive solution for unified application risk management. By combining comprehensive discovery, automated risk assessment, and remediation into a single, AI-powered solution, TotalAppSec enables organizations to proactively address risks across web applications and APIs while embedding security throughout the development lifecycle.
- Unified platform for application risk management – TotalAppSec consolidates complete discovery of web apps & APIs, web app and API security testing, API compliance testing, risk prioritization, and integrated remediation into one platform. This unified approach provides security teams with a comprehensive view of their web attack surface and a clear path to mitigate risks.
- Extensive coverage across diverse environments – Whether the web assets are on-premises, multi-cloud, containerized, or hosted in API gateways, TotalAppSec ensures complete visibility. Its ability to integrate with both native Qualys tools (e.g., VMDR, CSAM, EASM, TotalCloud) and third-party platforms (e.g., AWS, Azure, Mulesoft, APIgee) enables organizations to manage all web apps & APIs – known and unknown, shadow and forgotten – from a single view.
Qualys TotalAppSec in Action
The power of Qualys TotalAppSec lies in its ability to deliver actionable insights and streamlined workflows across three critical pillars: Discovery, Risk Assessment, and Response.
Discover: Complete Visibility Across Your Application Ecosystem
TotalAppSec empowers organizations to achieve a comprehensive inventory of known, unknown, forgotten, and shadow web apps and APIs.
- Comprehensive discovery – TotalAppSec identifies web applications and APIs across diverse environments, including on-prem, multi-cloud, API gateways, and containers. With native integrations into Qualys tools like VMDR, CSAM/EASM, and TotalCloud, as well as third-party platforms like AWS, Azure, Kubernetes, Mulesoft, and APIgee, organizations can gain full visibility into their attack surface.
- Detection of shadow APIs and forgotten web apps – Shadow APIs and forgotten applications pose significant risks, often flying under the radar of traditional tools. TotalAppSec automatically uncovers these hidden assets, bringing them into the fold for proactive monitoring.
Risk Assessment: Accurate, Automated, and Unified
TotalAppSec delivers automated risk assessment that identifies and evaluates vulnerabilities in real time.
- Automated security and compliance testing – TotalAppSec conducts automated security testing for web app and API vulnerabilities like OWASP Top 10 risks, OWASP API Top 10, PII & sensitive data exposures, injection attacks, rate limiting, authentication flaws, authorization issues, zero-day malware, and more. TotalAppSec performs both active and passive compliance monitoring to identify any drift or inconsistencies in API implementation and documentation in adherence to the OpenAPI Specification (OAS v3).
- Consolidated view of third-party tools – By consolidating findings from third-party manual PEN testing tools such as BurpSuite and Bugcrowd, TotalAppSec provides a single source of truth for risk assessment.
Response: Prioritize and Remediate What Matters Most
TotalAppSec transforms reactive security into a proactive, business-aligned process by integrating automated prioritization and remediation directly into operational workflows.
- TruRiskTM Scoring – By leveraging the Qualys TruRisk™ score, TotalAppSec prioritizes vulnerabilities based on asset criticality, exploitability, and business impact to focus remediation efforts where it matters most. By correlating risks across web apps, APIs, and infrastructure, TotalAppSec’s TruRisk™ score quantifies true application risk – not just isolated vulnerabilities. Using 25+ threat intelligence feeds, it prioritizes high-impact attack chains, reducing MTTR and enabling risk-informed decisions that prevent cascading breaches, compliance failures, and operational disruptions.
- Integrated remediation workflows – TotalAppSec automates ticket creation and integrates seamlessly with tools like Jira and ServiceNow. Combined with direct integration into CI/CD pipelines like Azure DevOps, Jenkins, TeamCity, Bamboo, etc., developers receive actionable tasks assigned in real time to remediate vulnerabilities early in the software development lifecycle.
Advanced AI Capabilities for Modern Application Security
As the threat landscape continues to evolve, traditional approaches to application security often fall short in addressing today’s sophisticated risks. To stay ahead, organizations need advanced capabilities that not only detect but also prioritize and mitigate risks efficiently. This is where Qualys TotalAppSec leads the charge. With its deep learning-based web malware detection and AI-powered Quick Scan, TotalAppSec redefines how security teams secure their application ecosystems with greater agility and precision.
1. Deep learning-based web malware detection
Modern malware threats evolve rapidly, often bypassing traditional signature-based detection methods. TotalAppSec addresses this challenge with its deep-learning algorithms and advanced AI models to identify both known and zero-day malware threats. By analyzing files using heuristic, behavioral, and reputational analysis techniques, TotalAppSec uncovers and identifies embedded malware that might otherwise remain hidden.
What sets this approach apart is its ability to detect malicious patterns without relying on predefined signatures. Using a deep learning model trained on vast datasets, TotalAppSec generates unique “neural fingerprints” for each file, comparing them against patterns of known and emerging malware.
2. AI-powered quick scan
When time is of the essence, the AI-powered quick scan in TotalAppSec ensures that vulnerabilities are identified and prioritized without delaying critical development timelines. It uses deep learning to cluster vulnerabilities and narrow its focus on areas of greatest risk, delivering 96% detection accuracy while reducing scan times by up to 80%. By dynamically learning from scan results in real time, the system continually improves its efficiency, providing organizations with actionable insights faster than traditional scanning methods. With its ability to cluster vulnerabilities by similar characteristics and focus on high-risk areas, Quick Scan ensures that critical issues are addressed early in the software development lifecycle. This makes it an ideal tool for Shift-Left security practices, enabling teams to maintain velocity without compromising on security.
Discover how Qualys TotalAppSec can help you measure, communicate, and eliminate web application and API risks. Sign up for your 30-day free trial today.
TotalAppSec – Unifying Application Risk for a Complete View of Security Posture
Security teams often struggle with incomplete risk assessments because application security is treated as a collection of independent layers – web apps, APIs, and the infrastructure that supports them. However, attackers don’t think in silos. They chain vulnerabilities across these layers to maximize impact.
So, what’s the real risk of an application? If you assess web app vulnerabilities separately from API risks and infrastructure exposures, you miss the compounding effect that turn a minor misconfiguration into a high-impact breach.
Take this example: A publicly exposed API with weak authentication (API risk) running an application vulnerable to an OWASP Top 10 issue (web app risk) – both hosted on an unpatched server running outdated software (infrastructure risk).
Individually, each issue might rank as a moderate risk. But correlated together, it creates a cascading high-risk impact – attackers can compromise the entire application stack, leading to data exfiltration, compliance failures, and operational downtime.
This is what TotalAppSec quantifies. Instead of separate, incomplete risk scores, TotalAppSec delivers a single TruRisk™ score—one that reflects the true business impact of an application’s vulnerabilities.
Security teams can prioritize remediation efforts based on correlated, high-risk scenarios, reducing MTTR (Mean Time to Remediate) and ensuring that critical applications receive immediate attention.
If you can’t quantify risk across an entire application, you can’t effectively reduce it.
TotalAppSec ensures security leaders aren’t reacting to individual alerts – but making data-driven, risk-informed decisions to protect their most critical assets.
Join us for the TotalAppSec Launch Webinar and discover how to transform your application security strategy.
