A vulnerability scanner will happily report thousands of findings. The trouble is that most of them don't matter in practice: a vulnerable library that's installed but never loaded, a flaw in a code path that never executes, a theoretical weakness behind controls that make it unreachable. Treating every finding as an urgent fix is how security teams burn out chasing risks that were never exploitable, while the genuinely dangerous few wait in the same undifferentiated pile.
The grant US12095806B1, "Cybersecurity vulnerability validation techniques utilizing runtime data, static analysis and dynamic inspection" (issued September 17, 2024, assigned to Wiz, Inc.), is built to cut through that noise. Its CPC classifications are the intrusion-detection classes H04L 63/1441, H04L 63/1416, and H04L 63/1425 — validation of which vulnerabilities are real, not just enumeration of which exist.
“A system and method for validating cybersecurity issues utilizing runtime data is disclosed.”— U.S. Patent No. 12,095,806 source
The mechanism worth understanding is the combination of three perspectives. Static analysis reveals what's present in the code; dynamic inspection reveals how it behaves when exercised; runtime data reveals what's actually happening in the live environment. A vulnerability that looks alarming in static analysis but, per runtime data, sits in code that never runs and behind controls that block it, is validated as low-priority. One that's present, exercised, and reachable is validated as urgent. The three views together separate the exploitable from the theoretical.
For defenders, the practical takeaway is that the scarce resource is attention, and validation is how you spend it well. Fixing the validated-exploitable vulnerabilities first — rather than working a flat list by severity score — concentrates effort where it reduces real risk. It's the difference between a team that's busy and a team that's effective.
That this comes from Wiz, one of the fastest-growing cloud-security companies, is a signal about where the market sees the problem. The bottleneck in modern security isn't finding vulnerabilities; it's prioritizing them honestly. Validation — proving which findings actually expose the organization — is increasingly the feature that separates a scanner that generates work from one that reduces risk.