Issue Prioritization

OX prioritizes issues by combining the original severity of a finding with additional context discovered during analysis. This approach helps surface the issues that present the highest risk in your environment instead of relying solely on the severity reported by the detection engine.

OX uses Severity Factors to capture the context that influences the final issue severity. This context enables OX to prioritize issues based on the actual risk in your environment rather than relying only on the original severity.

OX evaluates thousands of Severity Factors across different security domains to determine the final severity of an issue.

How issue prioritization works

When OX identifies an issue, it starts with the severity reported by the detection engine, either an OX native engine or a third-party engine. OX then evaluates additional context about the affected asset, dependency, or workload and applies the relevant Severity Factors.

Depending on the applicable Severity Factors, the issue severity can remain unchanged or be adjusted to better reflect the actual risk.

For each issue, OX displays:

• Original Severity

• Final Issue Severity

• The Severity Factors that influenced the final severity

On the Context tab, you can review the Severity Factors that influenced the final severity and understand why OX assigned the issue its current priority.

Severity Factor categories

Severity Factors are grouped into three categories that represent different aspects of an issue's risk.

Category	Description
Reachable	Indicates whether the affected asset, dependency, workload, or resource can be reached, increasing the likelihood that the issue can be exploited.
Exploitable	Indicates whether the issue can realistically be exploited based on the available evidence and environment.
Damage	Indicates the potential impact of a successful exploit, based on factors such as remote code execution, malicious dependencies, sensitive data exposure, and the affected application's Business Priority score.

A single issue can have multiple Severity Factors from one or more categories. Together, these factors provide the context OX uses to prioritize issues.

Security framework mappings

In addition to prioritizing issues, OX maps issues to well-known security frameworks and classifications, such as OWASP Top 10 Web Application Security Risks, OWASP Top 10 CI/CD Security Risks, OWASP API Security Top 10, CVSS, EPSS, CWE, CISA KEV, and PCI DSS.

These mappings provide additional context for findings and can be used to filter issues.

To filter issues by a security framework or classification:

1. Open the Active Issues page.

2. Open the filter menu.

3. Select Severity Factor.

4. Search for the framework or classification that you want to use.

5. Select one or more Severity Factors to display matching issues.

Note: OX automatically maps issues to supported security frameworks and classifications during analysis.