Contrast Security, the global leader in Application Detection and Response (ADR), announced the general availability of Northstar, a major release for the company that redefines how businesses see cyberattacks, stop breaches, and protect their applications and APIs. This is the industry’s first platform to unite developers, security, and operations teams through an integrated user experience. Contrast pairs runtime data and contextual analysis with AI-powered auto-remediation to cut response times and eliminate noise, marking a breakthrough in application-layer security.
The Contrast Graph: Live Runtime Insight That Drives Precision
At the core of the platform is the Contrast Graph, which powers its most advanced capabilities, including optional agentic AI workflows that help teams respond faster and fix smarter. The Contrast Graph builds a real-time digital twin of an organization’s application and API environment, mapping live attack paths, correlating runtime behavior, and exposing how vulnerabilities, threats, and assets are connected. This deep, dynamic context eliminates the guesswork that plagues traditional tools, enabling accurate, automated prioritization and remediation – so teams can focus on real risk and act with confidence.
Tyler Shields, Principal Analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, says, “Connecting security operations processes with application security incident and vulnerability detection capabilities is a significant step towards breaking down the silos that exist between developers, application security, and security operations teams. This broad contextual analysis offering lends itself well to advanced AI-based prioritization and automated remediation, which are the key security outcomes required by security organizations today.”
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Runtime Intelligence That Sees, Stops, and Solves
With the Northstar release, Security Operations and AppSec teams can, for the first time, see application-layer attacks as they happen, stop them instantly, and auto-remediate active vulnerabilities with the new Contrast AI. These capabilities leverage Contrast’s powerful real-time context – paired with dynamic risk scoring that reflects exploitability, impact, and live attack activity, so teams always know where to focus. The unified platform provides views that are tailored to each role, enabling developers to prioritize remediation while SOC teams zero in on the most critical threats to limit damage.
“We are excited to see the new features and feel that Contrast is set apart from other competitors, beyond reach. It makes our jobs better and easier. The real data will allow our team to take action more efficiently,” said Martha Gamez-Smith CISSP, PMP, SSCP, Information Security Officer – Texas Computer Cooperative | Education Service Center, Region 20.
Jeff Williams, an OWASP Founder, Contrast Security Founder and CTO, said, “Northstar is the culmination of everything we’ve learned about defending modern software. We didn’t just bolt together another set of tools—we reimagined AppSec from first principles. By combining runtime observability, real-time graph context, and AI-powered automation, we built a platform that doesn’t just find problems—it understands them, prioritizes them, and helps teams fix them fast. This is the platform I’ve wanted since OWASP’s earliest days—one that doesn’t just generate alerts, but actually defends the software that powers our world.”
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A Unified Perspective, Tailored for Every Team
Contrast delivers a new visual user experience built around the Contrast Graph, giving Dev, Sec, and Ops teams real-time visibility into attacks, vulnerabilities, and business risk – all in views tailored to their roles and integrated into the developer, CNAPP, and SIEM solutions they use every day. The Contrast Graph acts as a live map of the application and API environment, showing how vulnerabilities, threats, and assets are connected so teams can act faster, together.
Focus on What Matters Most
Dynamic Risk Scoring: Continuously prioritizes vulnerabilities with architectural, threat, and business context based on real-world observations in production – so defenders can fix what’s actually at risk.
Unified ADR + AST: Bring together Application Detection and Response and Application Security Testing to break down silos across development, AppSec, and SecOps with shared context that connects incidents to vulnerabilities, aligning teams around real threats and faster resolution.
Contrast AI SmartFix:Uses Contrast Graph data to generate fix plans, write code, create test scripts, and draft pull requests, dramatically reducing remediation time.
Contrast MCP Server:Opens up access to Contrast’s runtime insights – starting with vulnerability data and designed to support future agentic AI use cases.
Faster Rollouts. Easier Management.
Deployment Hub: Simplifies onboarding and managing updates across complex, distributed environments, speeding time to protection.
Flex Agent: Streamlines agent deployment and updates at scale with no manual configuration required, simplifying installation and reducing setup time.
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Source: businesswire
