JVM performance is generally fine, and the language prevents you from introducing whole classes of memory safety bugs. You can still shoot yourself in the foot with native (JNI) extensions, but the decent performance of the JVM makes developers use JNI far less frequently than, say, Python or Ruby devs reach for compiled libraries.
JVM byte code decompilation is fairly trivial, so tools for the security scanning of artifacts are cheaper and more fully featured than similar tools for scanning machine code.