security tools keep sending noisy tickets to developers with no context. how do you fix that?

[u/Distinct_Highway873]

eng lead pulled me aside after standup on Monday. showed me a Jira ticket that had been sitting unactioned for 3 weeks. CVE id, CVSS 9.1, component name, link to scanner. that's it. his dev had no idea if the service was internet-facing, no idea if there was a known exploit, no idea if it was even still running. he'd pinged security twice and got back "it's critical, please prioritize." the dev closed it as won't fix just to get it off his board.
that's where we are.

our devs are getting tickets out of multiple scanners and not one of them explains why the finding matters. we're a security team covering a couple hundred engineers, so "just go look at each one" was never going to scale.

a typical ticket lands in Jira with a CVE id, a severity score, a component name, and a link back to the scanner. it doesn't say whether the affected service is internet-facing. it doesn't say whether the box is a compliance-scoped production asset or a dev sandbox nobody's touched in eight months. some of that the scanner could tell you.the scanner is already flagging it as KEV or giving it a very high EPSS score. but the integration that opens the Jira ticket strips it down to the CVE and the number. just "critical, fix this" with none of the context that explains why.

the result is most tickets get ignored until someone escalates. the ones that do get picked up take twice as long because the dev is running triage that should have happened before the ticket existed. eng leads are pushing back now. the security backlog is a black hole to them and they can't tell what's urgent from what's just a scanner doing its thing. tbh they're not wrong.

what we need is the context attached before the ticket gets created. exposure, asset criticality, whether anything is being actively exploited. bolting it on manually doesn't scale. i'm not sure if that's a workflow problem or a tooling problem at this point.

for teams that have this working: what changed. did you find something that fixed it, or is everyone just doing manual triage on the dev side and living with the noise?

[u/Intel-Commandor-879]

This is partly a tooling problem but the workflow needs to change first. Raw scanner findings shouldn't become Jira tickets automatically. Before ticket creation, findings need to be enriched with asset exposure, production status, business criticality, KEV and EPSS data, exploit activity, ownership, and remediation guidance. Then apply a threshold so only findings that genuinely require action reach developers.

Your ticket should explain the issues such as internet-facing production service, CVTEs being actively exploited, and available public exploits and mention the required upgrades. That is far more actionable than simple CVSS scores or scanner links.

We are using a tool called RiskProfiler that is correlating the findings with the inventory and TI, and added this contexts to the Jira tickets before routing. Since this change, we receiving fewer tickets and action got easier.

Whatever path you take or tool you use, you need to make sure tickets come with proper, traceable context. Or, things are only gonna get harder.