Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

In a world where software is produced, distributed, and re-distributed, how do you ensure the software you consume is authentic and safe for your environment? How do you know the software you deployed yesterday is safe today? Most software exploits are discovered after the software has been deployed, which raises the question: It’s not just about getting software updates, as the majority of exploits are distributed as updates. Staying updated isn’t the most secure.

Cloudflare experienced a security breach when its internal systems were compromised, leading to unauthorized access to sensitive data. Another incident highlights the importance of maintaining strict secrets security across the supply chain.

As an integrator or government agency providing mission-critical software, the question to ask yourself is “Is my software development environment NIST SP 800-218 compliant?”. Compliance with NIST SP 800-218 and the SSDF (Secure Software Development Framework) is mandatory, and it’s time to ensure your software supply chain is compliant.

In October 2023, Okta, a leading provider of identity and access management (IAM) solutions, experienced a data breach affecting its customer support system. This incident raised serious concerns about the security of sensitive information entrusted to Okta by its customers and partners.

Top tips is a weekly column where we highlight what’s trending in the tech world today and list ways to explore these trends. This week, we’re looking at some of the cybersecurity strategies for supply chains. Cyberattacks have been increasing, and supply chains have taken a hit. In 2022, the United States witnessed a surge in supply chain cyberattacks, which affected 1,743 entities—the highest reported figure since 2017.

Today’s modern supply chains can be large and complex, involving many suppliers doing many different things. As digital transformation initiatives have accelerated, the ecosystem of suppliers has exploded. Effectively securing the supply chain is hard because vulnerabilities can be inherent, or introduced and exploited, at any point in the supply chain. Unfortunately, a compromised software supply chain can cause significant damage and disruption.

The new guidelines to secure GitHub repositories are being followed by every enterprise. These new protocols were circulated after discovering a vulnerable loophole in the self-hosted action runner in August 2023. To know more about the vulnerability, how and who discovered it, and its mitigation, read further.

The security of the software supply chain is rapidly becoming a paramount concern for organizations — and for good reason. With the increasing number of published Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs), developers face the challenge of delivering software faster than ever before. However, in their quest for speed, many dev and security teams have resorted to fragmented security solutions, inadvertently leaving critical gaps in coverage and compromising their competitive advantage.

Recently, Snyk hosted a wine tasting & customer discussion featuring David Imhoff, Product Security Leader at Kroger. The discussion focused on tackling the challenges of securing digital supply chains. Kroger is a retail giant with 2,700 stores and 400,000 employees. The organization faces unique challenges because it operates on such a massive scale, adding complexity to its software supply chain and security.

Did you know that nine out of 10 companies detected software supply chain risks in the past 12 months? The increase in the number of dependencies in a supply chain has extended the attack surface for adversaries. It has also caused threat actors to shift their focus from the downstream chain affecting just end users to the upstream chain affecting vendors, customers, and end users alike.