Continuous AppSec — CredShields

01 // THE PROBLEM

Annual pentests are 11 months too late.

By the time the report lands, half the codebase has changed. Critical findings get triaged into next quarter's roadmap. The auditor accepts the PDF; the bug is still in production. Continuous AppSec fixes the cadence problem.

Findings tied to specific commits, not codebase snapshots
Severity routing: critical blocks merge, medium opens ticket
Retest within hours of fix, not next quarter
Always-current evidence trail for auditors

.github/workflows/credshields.yml

name: CredShields AppSec
on: [pull_request, push]

jobs:
  appsec:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: credshields/scan-action@v2
        with:
          api-key: ${{ secrets.CS_KEY }}
          fail-on: high,critical
          slack: #appsec-alerts
          jira-project: SEC

# Critical findings → block merge
# Mediums → Jira ticket auto-created
# Quarterly: deep manual review
# Annual: SOC 2 evidence package

02 // WHAT CHANGES

Day 1, Day 30, Day 90.

Continuous AppSec isn't a longer pentest. It's a different operating model. Here's what your team actually experiences from kickoff to steady-state.

Day 1: CI integration deployed, baseline scan complete
Day 14: First findings triaged, ownership assigned in Jira
Day 30: Critical issues remediated, retest verified
Day 90: Full release-cycle coverage, audit-ready evidence

Engagement timeline

DAY 1
  · CI/CD integration live
  · Baseline pentest kicked off
  · Slack channel + Jira project provisioned

DAY 14
  · Baseline findings delivered
  · Severity-routed into your tracker
  · Engineering ownership assigned

DAY 30
  · First retest cycle complete
  · Critical and high issues verified fixed
  · Coverage dashboard live

DAY 90
  · Full release-cycle coverage
  · Audit-ready evidence binder
  · Quarterly deep-review report

→ Then: steady state. Forever.

How it works

Continuous, not transactional.

01

Integrate

GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Jenkins, CircleCI — 30-minute setup with your existing CI.

02

Baseline

Senior engineers run a deep manual pentest on your current state. This is your 'before' picture.

03

Continuous Scan

Every PR and meaningful release tested. AI-assisted triage, human verification on signal.

04

Route

Findings flow into Jira / Linear with severity, owner, reproduction steps, and fix guidance.

05

Retest

Mark as fixed in your tracker. We verify within hours and update the evidence trail.

06

Quarterly Review

Senior engineer goes deep on architectural changes, threat model evolution, new attack surfaces.

07

Annual Audit Package

SOC 2 / ISO 27001 / PCI evidence binder — drops straight into your auditor's hands.

08

Always On

No SOW renegotiation. No 'oh that's out of scope.' Continuous coverage of your entire app surface.

Integrations

Lands where your team already works.

Source control

GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Azure DevOps. PR comments, merge gates, status checks.

CI / CD

GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, CircleCI, Jenkins, Bitbucket Pipelines, Azure Pipelines.

Issue tracking

Jira, Linear, Asana, ClickUp. Auto-create tickets with severity, owner, and reproduction.

Team comms

Slack, Teams, Discord. Critical-finding alerts and weekly summary digests.

SIEM / monitoring

Datadog, Splunk, Elastic. Findings as events, dashboards as JSON.

SSO

Okta, Auth0, Google Workspace, Azure AD. SCIM provisioning for teams.

Pricing Model

Priced per app, not per engineer-hour.

Continuous AppSec is sold as an annual subscription, scoped by application count and release cadence. You know your full-year cost on day one. Unlimited retests within scope. No surprise change orders. No "out of scope" friction. Three tiers: Growth (up to 3 apps), Scale (up to 10 apps), Enterprise (custom). Quarterly senior-engineer deep reviews and an annual SOC 2 / ISO evidence package included on every tier.

Deliverables

What lands in your tools — and your auditor's binder.

PR-level findings

Each finding tied to specific commits, with reproduction steps and fix guidance. PR comments and merge gates configurable per severity.

Always-current evidence package

Audit-ready PDF rebuilt monthly. Pre-mapped to SOC 2 (CC6.1, CC6.6, CC7.1, CC7.2), ISO 27001 Annex A.12.6.1, A.14.2.8, and PCI 11.3.

Quarterly deep review

Senior engineer goes deep on architectural changes, threat model evolution, and new attack surfaces — delivered as a strategic report, not a finding dump.

Direct engineer access

Shared Slack channel with your audit team. Async questions answered same-day. Live debugging when needed. No SDR layer.

Continuous AppSec vs Alternatives

Why teams switch from annual pentests.

	Annual Pentest Vendor	Scanner-Only Tools	CredShields Continuous AppSec
Cadence	Once a year, 14-day window	Continuous, but noisy	Continuous, every release
Engineer validation	✓ But stale	✗ Scanner output only	✓ Every high+ finding
Business logic flaws	✓	✗	✓
Findings in your tracker	✗ PDF report only	~ Scanner-format only	✓ Jira/Linear with severity routing
Retest after fix	Next quarter, billable	Scanner re-runs	Within hours, included
Audit-ready evidence	Annual report, scramble before audit	✗	Always-current binder, pre-mapped
Pricing model	Per-engagement, change orders	Per-seat or per-asset	Per-app annual, no overages

Frequently Asked Questions

Common questions, answered.

How is Continuous AppSec different from a scanner like Snyk or Semgrep?

Scanners give you alerts; Continuous AppSec gives you exploited findings. Every issue we route into your tracker has been manually verified as exploitable by a senior security engineer — no scanner output dumped into Jira. We use scanners (including open-source ones like Semgrep, Slither, and ZAP) as one input among many; the output that reaches your team is engineer-curated.

What's the commercial model?

Annual contract priced by application count and release cadence — not engineer-hours. You know your cost on day one. Re-tests are unlimited within scope. No surprise change orders, no hourly billing meters, and no 'oh that's out of scope' moments mid-engagement. Most clients sit between $48k and $180k per year depending on app surface.

Can we keep our existing pentest vendor for the annual?

Yes — though most clients consolidate within the first year because the dual-vendor model creates duplicated scoping, finding-overlap, and audit-coordination work. We're happy to coexist or hand off, whichever fits your procurement cycle. Our SOC 2 evidence is accepted by all major audit firms.

Will this slow our deploys?

No. Default config gates merges only on critical findings. Mediums and lows route to tickets. Most teams set high+critical to block, everything else to warn. Build-time scanning runs in parallel with your test suite; manual pentest happens out-of-band on a sampling cadence you control.

Who reviews findings — engineers or scanners?

Senior security engineers. Every finding flagged as high or critical is manually reproduced before it lands in your tracker. We do not auto-route scanner output without human verification. Scanner-detected lows can be auto-routed to a separate triage queue if you want them visible.

How fast is the response on critical findings?

Critical findings are validated and reported into your Slack / Jira within 24 hours of discovery. For especially severe findings (active exploit-in-the-wild patterns, RCE, auth bypass on production data) we'll page on-call same-day.

Do you support compliance frameworks beyond SOC 2?

Yes — ISO 27001, ISO 27017, ISO 27018, PCI DSS Levels 1-4 (Service Provider), HIPAA, HITRUST, GDPR Article 32, CCPA, DORA, NIS2, FedRAMP Moderate, and customer-specific frameworks. Findings are mapped at routing time so your evidence binder is always current.

How long does onboarding take?

30-minute CI integration on day one. Baseline pentest delivered in 14 days. Steady-state continuous coverage from day 30. Full audit-ready evidence package available from day 90.

Can we get a sample report before signing?

Yes. Sanitized full reports are available on the Sample Pentest Report page — pick one closest to your industry. Live walkthroughs with the senior pentester are also available during evaluation.

What happens at the end of the engagement?

All findings, evidence, methodology documents, and audit packages are yours forever — exported as PDFs and machine-readable JSON. Most clients renew because the cadence has become how their team ships; if you don't, you keep everything we delivered.

What happens after we sign — what are the first 30 days?

Day 1: CI integration deployed (30-minute setup), baseline pentest kicked off, Slack channel and Jira project provisioned. Day 14: Baseline findings delivered, severity-routed into your tracker, ownership assigned. Day 30: First retest cycle complete with critical and high issues verified fixed. By Day 90 you're in steady state with full release-cycle coverage.

What if my engineering team can't fix findings fast enough?

We don't leave you stranded. Each finding includes specific fix guidance with code examples. We'll do live debugging sessions over Slack for tricky issues. For critical issues that take time to fix architecturally, we help with mitigation plans and compensating controls — both of which auditors accept as evidence of process.

Can we run Continuous AppSec on a per-app basis or is it all-or-nothing?

Per-app. You can start with one critical application (typically the customer-facing SaaS app or the payment service) and add more apps as the program matures. Most clients start with 1-3 apps and expand within the first year.

Do you replace our existing SAST/DAST tools?

No, we complement them. SAST tools like Snyk, Semgrep, and SonarQube catch a different class of issues (code-level, dependencies). We handle the manual pentest layer that catches business logic, multi-tenant isolation, and complex auth flows. Most clients run both.

Ready to ship secure?

Talk to a senior engineer. No SDR script, no slide deck — just a working session about your stack.

What is Continuous AppSec

Pentesting that runs every release, not once a year.

Continuous Application Security (Continuous AppSec) is an evergreen engagement model where a security team — automated and human — tests your application on every meaningful release rather than once per year. Each commit, pull request, or feature deploy passes through a graduated set of checks: scanner-based static and dynamic analysis on every push, AI-assisted differential analysis on every PR, and senior-engineer manual pentesting on every meaningful release.

It exists because the annual penetration test, originally invented for waterfall-shipped on-premise software, doesn't match how SaaS teams ship. A typical Series B fintech merges 200 commits a week. By the time an annual pentest report lands, the codebase under review is 11 months stale and findings often refer to code that's already been refactored.

Continuous AppSec replaces that broken cadence with a recurring relationship: your security posture stays current with your codebase, findings flow into Jira within hours of being discovered, retests happen the day a fix lands, and audit evidence — for SOC 2, ISO 27001, PCI DSS — is always current rather than scrambled together at audit time.

Engagements run 12-month minimum to align with SOC 2 / ISO audit cycles
Findings are engineer-validated — no scanner output dumped into your tracker
Quarterly senior-engineer deep reviews complement continuous coverage
All findings mapped to OWASP ASVS, OWASP API Top 10, MITRE ATT&CK, CWE, and your applicable compliance controls

Pricing model

Priced per app, not per engineer-hour.

Annual contract sized to your application count and release cadence. You know your cost on day one. Re-tests are unlimited within scope; there are no surprise change-orders, no hourly billing meters, and no 'oh that's out of scope' moments mid-engagement.

Engagement length

12-month contract minimum

Pricing axis

Application count × release cadence

Re-tests included

Unlimited within engagement scope

Critical-finding response

Validated and reported within 24 hours

Audit evidence

Always-current; included at no additional cost

Onboarding time

30-minute CI integration; 14 days to first baseline report

What you get

Deliverables that show up where your team works.

QUARTERLY

Audit-ready PDF reports

Quarterly deep-review reports formatted for direct inclusion in audit binders. Pre-mapped to SOC 2, ISO 27001, PCI DSS controls.

CONTINUOUS

Findings in your tracker

Critical and high-severity findings auto-create Jira / Linear tickets with severity, owner suggestion, reproduction steps, and fix guidance.

ON-DEMAND

Retest verification

Mark a ticket as fixed in your tracker; we verify and update the evidence trail within 24 hours. No new SoW, no new invoice.

ALWAYS-ON

Direct engineer access

Slack or Teams channel with the assigned senior pentester. Ask questions, share context, get answers — not a ticketing portal.

LIVE

Compliance evidence

Live coverage matrix showing tested vs. untested controls per framework. Auditor-ready at any point in the engagement.

REFERENCEABLE

Methodology document

Referenceable engagement-methodology document your auditor can include in their workpapers. NIST SP 800-115, OWASP ASVS, PTES aligned.

Buyer's guide

Continuous AppSec vs. alternatives.

	Annual pentest	Bug bounty program	Continuous AppSec
Cadence	Once per year	Continuous (paid per-finding)	Every meaningful release
Coverage	Snapshot in time	Whatever bounty hunters look at	Full app surface, methodically
Cost predictability	Fixed	Variable; can blow budgets	Fixed annual
Audit acceptance	Yes; report is the artifact	Often insufficient alone	Yes; evidence pre-mapped to controls
Findings quality	High; senior pentester	Wildly variable	High; same senior pentesters
Time to fix → retest	Next annual cycle	Pay for retest or self-verify	< 24 hours, included

Continuous Application Security as a Service

AppSec that runs with your team.

Annual pentests are 11 months too late.

Day 1, Day 30, Day 90.

Continuous, not transactional.

Lands where your team already works.

Priced per app, not per engineer-hour.

What lands in your tools — and your auditor's binder.

Why teams switch from annual pentests.

Common questions, answered.

Pentesting that runs every release, not once a year.

Priced per app, not per engineer-hour.

Deliverables that show up where your team works.

Continuous AppSec vs. alternatives.

The pentest your auditor will accept.
The findings your engineers will fix.

Continuous Application Security as a Service

AppSec that runs with your team.

Annual pentests are 11 months too late.

Day 1, Day 30, Day 90.

Continuous, not transactional.

Lands where your team already works.

Priced per app, not per engineer-hour.

What lands in your tools — and your auditor's binder.

Why teams switch from annual pentests.

Common questions, answered.

Continue exploring CredShields AppSec

Pentesting that runs every release, not once a year.

Priced per app, not per engineer-hour.

Deliverables that show up where your team works.

Continuous AppSec vs. alternatives.

Related services

The pentest your auditor will accept.The findings your engineers will fix.

The pentest your auditor will accept.
The findings your engineers will fix.