What is DORA?

The Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) is a sweeping EU regulation that went into effect in January 2025. It mandates that financial institutions and their technology partners demonstrate continuous resilience against cyber threats, including full lifecycle vulnerability and patch management.

Who Is Subject to DORA Compliance?

• Financial entities, including banks, credit institutions, insurers, investment firms, crypto asset service providers, data reporting service providers, and payment processors.
• Third-party ICT service providers that deliver technology services to financial institutions—especially those designated as critical to operational resilience.

Penalties for Non-Compliance

Firms failing to meet DORA requirements can face severe consequences:

• Fines of up to 2% of global annual turnover for critical failures
• Personal penalties for executives up to €1,000,000
• For critical third-party providers: fines up to €5,000,000, or €500,000 for individuals
• Potential license suspension or revocation for repeated violations

How Seal Security Helps You Meet DORA Requirements

Seal Security patches all open source vulnerabilities including critical and high-severity vulnerabilities for applications, Linux operating systems (OS), and containers within 72 hours of being made public. We operate entirely at build time, so no access to your production environment is required. 

To help you minimize the risk of violations, we have mapped out how we can remediate open source vulnerabilities highlighted in DORA’s Article 10: Vulnerability and Patch Management.

Article 10 Section Two: The vulnerability management procedures shall

(d) track the usage of third-party libraries, including open-source libraries, used by ICT services supporting critical or important functions

Visibility and Control Over Open Source Dependencies

DORA requires organizations to “track the usage of third-party libraries, including open-source libraries, used by ICT services supporting critical or important functions.” Seal Security enables this through deep integration into the development lifecycle.

Seal Apps secures the open source libraries and application dependencies your software relies on, covering both direct and transitive dependencies. It integrates with your existing SCA tools and source repositories to automatically detect, track, and patch open source components in real time.

Rather than forcing upgrades that may introduce instability, Seal Apps applies vulnerability-free security patches for CVEs for open source components. This means even CVEs in legacy, unmaintained, or third-party code can be remediated. One-click patching makes the process frictionless for AppSec and development teams.

Through integration with your CI pipelines, Seal Apps also generates and maintains accurate SBOMs (Software Bills of Materials), which document the complete inventory of third-party and open source libraries. These SBOMs help AppSec teams demonstrate complete supply chain transparency to assessors, auditors, counterparties, and regulators.

Seal OS complements application-level security by securing the operating system layer. It automatically remediates Linux vulnerabilities, including those in EOL systems—helping you maintain compliance even when infrastructure components are no longer officially supported.

Together, Seal Apps and Seal OS provide full-stack visibility and automated remediation, enabling you to track, secure, and prove control over your open source and OS layers in accordance with DORA.

(f) prioritize the deployment of patches and other mitigation measures to address the vulnerabilities identified

Seal Base Images deliver production-ready base images that are actively maintained and kept free from known CVEs. These prebuilt, production-ready, vulnerability-free images give your team a compliant foundation for containerized and VM-based workloads without the complexity of manual patching or remediation.

By continuously updating base images and addressing vulnerabilities as they emerge, Seal Base Images directly supports DORA’s mandate to “prioritize the deployment of patches and other mitigation measures to address the vulnerabilities identified.”

You can deploy with confidence knowing that every image is secure by default and designed to pass even the most rigorous security audits.

(g) monitor and verify the remediation of vulnerabilities

Continuous Monitoring and Verification of Remediation

DORA requires organizations to “monitor and verify the remediation of vulnerabilities” and Seal Security directly supports this through multiple layers of visibility, control, and evidence.

Seal Security facilitates continuous monitoring by providing real-time visibility into vulnerabilities across open source components, automating remediation at build time, and maintaining an up-to-date SBOM. By continuously scanning for risks in both direct and transitive dependencies, Seal helps organizations proactively mitigate ICT threats, monitor third-party software risks, and generate audit-ready reports ensuring compliance with DORA’s operational resilience and risk management requirements.

Cryptographically signed patches: All fixes from Seal, whether OS or application-level, are delivered as signed binaries or updates​. This gives assurance that the patch is authentic and has not been tampered with. Using signed patches makes it easier to pass security audits and confirm the integrity that each open source patch can be verified.

Updated SBOMs and reporting: Seal Security enables better tracking, documentation, and management of software components, enhancing transparency and compliance across your software supply chain for your applications and images. This simplifies the task of tracking open source components and producing evidence to auditors. With an up-to-date SBOM and Seal’s remediation history, monthly reporting becomes easier as you can demonstrate that all components are known and all critical patches have been applied. 

With Seal, monitoring and verification are built into your security workflow.

Article 10 Section Four: The patch management procedures shall

(a) to the extent possible identify and evaluate available software and hardware patches and updates using automated tools

Seal’s automatic remediation feature seals vulnerable packages automatically whenever a new vulnerability is made public. 

(d) set deadlines for the installation of software and hardware patches and updates and escalation procedures in case those deadlines cannot be met

Seal guarantees a 72-hour remediation SLA for critical and high-severity CVEs once they are made public, which ensures that you meet aggressive remediation timelines and maintain compliance.

Bottom Line

Seal enables AppSec, compliance, and development teams to meet DORA’s OSS requirements without disrupting development workflows. We offer automated patching for hard-to-fix systems, audit-ready compliance artifacts like SBOMs and signed patches, and reduce the risk of fines or operational delays. All of this is achieved without forcing code rewrites or placing extra burden on development teams.