Contrast Northstar brings real-time AI to application security
Contrast Security has announced the general availability of its new platform, Northstar, aimed at providing a unified application security experience for development, AppSec, and security operations teams.
The Northstar release introduces features which allow teams to monitor application-layer attacks in real time, mitigate breaches, and remediate vulnerabilities using artificial intelligence within minutes, according to the company.
The Contrast Graph
Central to the platform is the Contrast Graph, which creates a digital twin of an organisation's application and API environment. The Graph maps live attack paths, monitors runtime behaviour, and visualises the connection between vulnerabilities, threats, and system assets to facilitate prioritisation and remediation.
The company states that this live, dynamic context is intended to "eliminate the guesswork that plagues traditional tools" by focusing efforts on actual risk and allowing targeted, automated responses. Contrast's approach combines runtime data, contextual analysis, and AI-enabled auto-remediation in an effort to reduce noise and enable precise responses. Tyler Shields, Principal Analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, said: "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 prioritisation and automated remediation, which are the key security outcomes required by security organisations today."
Runtime intelligence
The Northstar release is designed to give Security Operations and AppSec teams a real-time understanding of application-layer threats as they occur. Active vulnerabilities can be auto-remediated with the new Contrast AI functionality, using live context and dynamic risk scoring to support decision making. The unified platform offers different views tailored to specific roles, so that developers can focus on prioritising remediation while SOC teams can identify and act on the most critical threats.
Martha Gamez-Smith, Information Security Officer at Texas Computer Cooperative | Education Service Center, Region 20, commented: "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."
Contrast Northstar pairs runtime intelligence with automation, and aims to streamline how organisations defend software against evolving risks by providing a shared perspective for development, security, and operational teams.
Unified user experience
The new release delivers a visual experience built around the Contrast Graph, providing real-time visibility into attacks, vulnerabilities, and business risks. These views can be tailored for each team and integrated with existing developer, CNAPP, and SIEM tools. The Contrast Graph functions as a live map, helping teams to better understand the relationships between vulnerabilities, threats, and assets to enable collaborative response.
Key features
Northstar features dynamic risk scoring that prioritises vulnerabilities based on their context in production, including architecture, threats, and business risk. The platform unifies Application Detection and Response (ADR) with Application Security Testing (AST), providing shared context for incident and vulnerability correlation. This aims to break down silos between teams and improve the speed and accuracy of threat resolution.
The Contrast AI SmartFix capability utilises Graph data to generate specific remediation plans, write code, create test scripts, and draft pull requests. The Contrast MCP Server makes runtime insights available across environments, supporting future AI-driven use cases.
The Deployment Hub is designed to simplify onboarding and the roll-out of updates across complex environments, helping organisations to deploy protection faster. The Flex Agent streamlines the process of agent deployment and updates, requiring no manual configuration and lessening installation times.
Northstar integrates with established security products such as Splunk, Wiz, and Sumo Logic, and the company says that additional integrations and strategic partnerships will be announced in the coming weeks.
Discussing the release, Jeff Williams, OWASP Founder, and 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, prioritises 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."
The Northstar release is now available to partners and enterprises looking to update their application security programmes via a unified, real-time security operations and remediation toolset. Additional partnerships and integrations are set to follow in the coming weeks.
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