Remember pumping quarters into arcade games, watching your hard-earned allowance disappear one game at a time? Bruce Fram, CEO of AppSecAI, remembers those days well. "I played some arcade games as a kid that ate your quarters," he recalls. But today's enterprises are playing a far more expensive game—and the stakes are measured in millions, not quarters.
The Original Pay-to-Play Model
In the golden age of arcades, games like Centipede, Space Invaders, and Whac-A-Mole had a brilliant business model: keep players feeding quarters for the privilege of an endless, unwinnable battle. You'd hammer down one mole, another would pop up. Blast one centipede segment, watch it split and multiply. Game over? Insert coin to continue.
Sound familiar? Today's application security teams are trapped in the same arcade, except instead of quarters, they're feeding $5,000 to $20,000 per vulnerability fix into a system designed for infinite play. One enterprise we work with has 20,000 vulnerabilities in their backlog—that's a $100 million arcade habit with no high score in sight.
The Vulnerability Whac-A-Mole Championship
During a strategy session about gamifying security education, our team joked about creating "Vulnerability Whac-A-Mole"—a game where security issues pop up faster than you can fix them. The joke landed a little too close to home. This isn't a game concept; it's literally what AppSec teams do every day.
The parallels are uncanny:
The OWASP Top 10: Same Game, Different Decade
Here's the kicker: we've been playing this same game for 22 years. The OWASP Top 10 from 2003 looks eerily similar to 2025's list. SQL injection? Still there. Broken access control? Yep. Security misconfiguration? Of course.
It's like being stuck on level one of Centipede for two decades, except the mushrooms keep regenerating and the spider gets faster while you're still using the same trackball from 1981.
As our analysis revealed: "After 22 years, eight out of 10 vulnerabilities are still roughly the same." We've essentially been playing the same security arcade game since before Gmail existed.
From Arcade Economics to AI Economics
The genius of arcade games wasn't just their addictive gameplay—it was their economic model. Make the game hard enough that players fail regularly, but fun enough they'll pay to continue. The application security industry inadvertently copied this model: make tools that find problems but don't fix them, ensuring endless billable hours.
But what if we changed the game entirely?
Instead of charging quarters (or thousands) per attempt, what if fixing vulnerabilities cost pennies and took minutes? What if, instead of whacking moles one at a time, you could clear the entire board with AI-powered automation?
Breaking the High Score
During that same strategy session where "Vulnerability Whac-A-Mole" was born, Bruce made a critical observation: "We wanna get the fix idea in there, because we fix stuff. The idea is, can we fix it? Which is the best fix?"
This shift from finding to fixing changes everything:
The New High Score
In the arcade era, high scores were about endurance—how long could you last before the inevitable game over? In modern AppSec, the high score should be about elimination—how many vulnerabilities can you actually fix?
With 200 developers each fixing one vulnerability per week in 15 minutes, an enterprise can eliminate 10,000 vulnerabilities annually. Try that with the old model, where each fix takes eight hours of research and coding. Game over before you even start.
The Power-Up We've Been Waiting For
Bruce notes that "all the AI people, the founders of this industry...they all have gaming backgrounds." From chess to Go to Fortnite, games have been AI's training ground. Now that same AI is the power-up that breaks the endless AppSec arcade cycle.
The irony? We're using technology trained on games to stop playing games with security.
Insert Coin to Continue? No Thanks.
The vulnerability management arcade has been profitable for vendors selling quarters—I mean, scanners—for decades. There are 69+ venture-funded companies just helping you prioritize which moles to whack. Not fix them. Just prioritize them. It's like having 69 companies selling you strategies for Centipede, but none of them giving you a better weapon.
We're done feeding quarters into a rigged game. It's time to flip the table on vulnerability management economics.
The choice is simple: Keep playing Whac-A-Mole with your $100 million vulnerability backlog, watching the same problems pop up year after year, quarter after quarter. Or change the game entirely with AI-powered remediation that actually fixes problems instead of just finding them.
Unlike those old arcade games, when it comes to application security, "Game Over" isn't just losing your quarters—it's a breach that costs your business millions.
Time to stop playing games with security. Time to start winning.
Ready to break your high score? Stop playing vulnerability Whac-A-Mole and start fixing at scale with AppSecAI.