In cybersecurity, you rarely know you’ve made the wrong move until it’s too late. The attacker gets to move first. They quietly probe your systems, dependencies, and vendor integrations while you, the defender, operate in the dark. You’re forced to make decisions based on partial visibility and uncertain assumptions.
In quantum physics, Schrödinger’s Cat is a thought experiment designed to illustrate uncertainty. A cat in a sealed box may be either alive or dead. Until you open the box, it exists in a state of both. It’s a paradox of perception: the truth is unknowable until observed.
Security teams, knowingly or not, live inside a version of that box every day. A critical vulnerability in your application might be exploitable, or it might not. There might be an exploit quietly sitting in a third-party library, a deserialization flaw in an old API, or a critical CVE your vendor hasn’t patched yet. You may be under attack right now. Or not. Without full visibility into what’s happening inside your systems, you’re operating in a state of security by assumption.
And assumptions don’t hold up to attackers or compliance auditors.
Java Security by Assumption Is a Dangerous Strategy
In the realm of cybersecurity, you can never assume you’re safe. Until you have evidence that you’re safe, you are vulnerable. Even if no active vulnerability is present in your system, lack of visibility in itself equates to vulnerability.
Traditional security measures (firewalls, periodic scans, and patch management) provide a false sense of security by offering fragmented visibility. They often fail to account for the complexities of modern applications, especially those built on legacy Java frameworks.
A WAF can tell you what reached your perimeter, but offers no insight into what happened once traffic entered the application. SAST tools analyze your proprietary code, but given today’s dependency-heavy Java applications, that may only account for a third of your actual production environment. SIEM platforms rely on proper log ingestion and known patterns to catch issues, while patching programs depend on vendor cooperation and risk introducing downtime in legacy systems.
Additionally, they can provide a deluge of false positives, which further clouds the seriousness of each individual vulnerability and makes it more difficult to respond appropriately when critical vulnerabilities are found.
Each of these tools has its place, but collectively, they leave substantial blind spots. And what you can’t see, you can’t secure.
Unseen Doesn’t Mean Safe
A vulnerability doesn’t lose its danger simply because you’re unaware of it. In fact, the further out of your sight it is, the easier it is for attackers to infiltrate and move laterally without being detected.
Java has the highest percentage of ignored vulnerabilities across ecosystems, with more than 42.5% going unaddressed. This is an industry-wide problem. 74% of modern codebases contain high-risk open source vulnerabilities, and 91% rely on components that are ten or more versions out of date.
How does this happen? Well, zero-day exploits often remain undetected because signature-based tools can’t identify what they haven’t seen before. Third-party Java applications, commonplace in ERP, inventory, and logistics systems, often operate as black boxes, completely opaque to internal security tooling. Shadow IT adds another layer of uncertainty, where internal teams spin up tools or services without going through security reviews. And then there are the aging legacy Java apps, still running in production because updating them would break something critical.
Attackers rely on these security grey areas. They know most organizations are only monitoring what they built, which is usually only one part of their total attack surface.
Compliance Will Open the Box
If an attacker doesn’t expose your assumptions, a compliance audit will.
Modern regulatory frameworks require more than good intentions. PCI DSS 4.0 mandates timely mitigation or the use of compensating controls that are equivalent in strength to an actual patch. HIPAA demands safeguards that are “reasonable and appropriate,” with verifiable logging. GDPR and CCPA impose fines for preventable breaches, including those caused by third-party dependencies.
Partial visibility doesn’t pass audits. It doesn’t matter whether the vulnerability came from your code, a vendor’s module, or an old library. What matters is that it was in production, and you didn’t have an answer for it. Failing to pass a compliance audit can mean halting operations or even paying fines.
Java security teams can’t afford to gamble on “probably secure.” At some point, someone will open the box. And it’s far better for everyone if it’s you.
Runtime Security: Open the Box. Save the Cat.
This is where Waratek offers something different. Rather than adding another alerting layer, Waratek acts as a runtime enforcer. It doesn’t rely on CVE databases or known signatures. It doesn’t care whether the code is homegrown or vendor-supplied. Instead, it evaluates real-time behavior inside the Java Virtual Machine, watching for risky patterns and intercepting threats before they can execute.
This model solves three persistent problems. First, Waratek doesn’t depend on known patterns to stop an attack. It can detect and prevent zero-days based on what the code tries to do rather than where it came from. Second, because it operates inside the runtime itself, it isn’t limited to proprietary code or endpoints. And third, it protects instantly with virtual patching, applying mitigations without code changes or redeployments.
Security You Can Prove
Waratek’s model is both technically effective and operationally defensible. Each virtual patch is logged in Common Event Format (CEF), complete with CVE, CWE, and attack vector metadata. Security teams gain an auditable trail showing exactly what threat was mitigated, when it occurred, and how it was handled.
That kind of visibility translates directly into compliance confidence. GRC teams don’t need to guess. Auditors don’t need to assume. And security leaders no longer have to accept hope as the default strategy for protecting their Java environments.
Stop Assuming and Start Knowing
You can’t protect what you can’t see. And you can’t afford to think you’re secure until the day something proves otherwise.
In security, uncertainty is the most dangerous vulnerability of all. With Waratek, the box is open, the runtime is visible and the threats are neutralized.
