Security teams are often caught in an endless cycle: scan, patch, repeat.

Yet the reality remains: fixing CVEs does not necessarily reduce real-world risk. In many cases, engineering and security teams invest significant effort into remediating vulnerabilities that:

• Never execute in production environments.
  
  
• Exist in unused or unreachable code paths.
  
  
• Originate from bloated, overly permissive base container images.
  
  
• Are primarily addressed to satisfy compliance checklists, rather than to mitigate active threats.
  
  

This reactive approach is inefficient, unsustainable, and ill-suited to the scale and speed of modern software delivery.

The Limitations of Traditional CVE Remediation

Organizations today face increasing difficulty in separating critical threats from background noise. The conventional vulnerability management model introduces several major challenges:

• Thousands of new CVEs (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) emerge daily, but the vast majority pose minimal or no active risk.
  
  
• Teams are overwhelmed with alerts, many of which are false positives or irrelevant to production environments.
  
  
• Manual patching efforts slow release cycles, diverting engineering resources away from innovation and feature delivery.
  
  
• Compliance initiatives become reactive and checklist-driven, rather than serving as strategic security enablers.
  
  

The result is operational fatigue, bloated infrastructure, and a persistent gap between vulnerability detection and meaningful risk reduction.

A Proactive Alternative: The RapidFort Approach

Instead of reacting to vulnerabilities after they surface, RapidFort introduces a prevention-first security model — eliminating many conditions that allow vulnerabilities to exist in the first place.

Through its Software Attack Surface Management (SASM) platform and RF Near Zero CVE Images, security and DevOps teams can:

• Prevent known vulnerabilities from entering the software stack at the earliest stages.
  
  
• Profile software behavior during development to identify and eliminate unused components.
  
  
• Harden runtime environments without introducing friction into development workflows.
  
  

This integrated, automated approach significantly reduces attack surfaces, accelerates compliance readiness, and strengthens overall software integrity — enabling organizations to scale securely without slowing down innovation.

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Step 1: Begin with RF Near Zero CVE Images

The majority of container vulnerabilities originate from non-essential software packages embedded within base images.

RF Near Zero CVE Images eliminate this risk early by providing production-ready, hardened container images featuring:

• FIPS 140-3 validated cryptographic modules to support secure deployments.
  
  
• Benchmark-aligned hardening to STIG and CIS standards, ensuring alignment with NIST SP 800-70 guidance.
  
  
• Support for major Linux distributions, including Alpine, Ubuntu, Red Hat, and Debian.
  
  
• Minimal, efficient, enterprise-grade container images designed for secure, scalable use in production environments.
  
  
• Built-in readiness for compliance frameworks like FedRAMP, SOC 2, and CMMC.
  
  

By removing vulnerable software components before deployment, organizations can significantly reduce remediation efforts, strengthen their security posture, and accelerate their compliance readiness — all without disrupting development pipelines.

Step 2: Profile at DevTime with RBOM™

Traditional vulnerability scanning tools often conflate theoretical risks with real-world exposure. RapidFort’s SASM platform changes this by instrumenting workloads during build and test phases to produce actionable insights based on actual software behavior.

Key capabilities include:

• Generation of a Real Bill of Materials™ (RBOM™), reflecting which software components are actively loaded, executed, or utilized.
  
  
• Identifying vulnerabilities in unreachable or inactive code paths dramatically reduces noise.
  
  
• Automated detection and flagging of unused software packages and libraries.
  
  
• Prioritization of vulnerabilities based on runtime relevance, enabling teams to focus resources where they matter most.
  
  

This depth of profiling empowers engineering and security teams to move beyond volume-based alerting — addressing vulnerabilities that truly impact live production workloads.

Step 3: Secure at RunTime

Even after deployment, vulnerabilities can emerge from operational drift, evolving threats, and unused software components. RapidFort’s SASM platform extends protection into production environments, delivering continuous runtime hardening without introducing friction.

At RunTime, RapidFort enables:

• Baseline monitoring of container behavior, building an execution-path profile to distinguish active software from dormant components.
  
  
• Real-time detection of anomalies and active threats, empowering teams to respond quickly and surgically.
  
  
• Automated removal or isolation of unused and vulnerable components, further shrinking the software attack surface.
  
  
• Reduction of container attack surfaces by up to 90%, improving security resilience without increasing operational overhead.
  
  

This continuous intelligence allows organizations to harden their production environments proactively, securing workloads at runtime — not just during development.

Security and Compliance Outcomes

By adopting RapidFort’s prevention-first approach, organizations achieve measurable improvements across security, operations, and compliance initiatives:

• Eliminate up to 95% of known vulnerabilities by removing unused components and unreachable code paths — without requiring source code changes.
  
  
• Reduction of container attack surfaces by up to 90%, strengthening application resilience against emerging threats.
  
  
• Acceleration of FedRAMP, CMMC, and SOC 2 certification readiness timelines by up to three months, through hardening with STIG/CIS benchmarks.
  
  
• Reduction in manual patching workloads by up to 68%, allowing engineering teams to focus on innovation rather than reactive maintenance.
  
  
• Decrease in infrastructure overhead and development costs, resulting from smaller, more efficient container deployments.
  
  

With RapidFort, security shifts from reactive remediation to proactive prevention — enabling teams to scale confidently without compromising velocity or compliance readiness.

Rethinking CVE Remediation

Modern security programs should not be defined by endless firefighting. Instead, they should focus on preventing vulnerabilities from entering the environment in the first place.

With RapidFort, organizations can:

• Build on hardened, RF Near Zero CVE Images to eliminate non-essential software risks upfront.
  
  
• Automatically detect and remove unnecessary software components through real-time DevTime profiling and RunTime hardening.
  
  
• Secure and optimize CI/CD pipelines and production workloads, regardless of technology stack or operating environment.
  
  
• Accelerate compliance readiness initiatives, supported by integrated benchmarking and continuous monitoring aligned to frameworks like FedRAMP, SOC 2, and CMMC.
  
  

By moving from reactive remediation to proactive prevention, RapidFort empowers teams to reduce vulnerabilities at scale and sustain a strong security posture without slowing down innovation.

Eliminate Up to 95% of CVEs — Proactively

The modern software supply chain demands more than reactive scanning and patching. With RapidFort, DevOps and security teams can prevent vulnerabilities before they appear, and achieve continuous risk reduction without code changes.

👉 Start securing your software supply chain today — Get Started with a Free Trial