Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

On Thursday, May 6, Colonial Pipeline, which operates a pipeline that delivers gasoline and jet fuel to nearly 45 percent of the U.S. East Coast, fell victim to a ransomware attack. The attack took over 100 gigabytes of data hostage, causing the company to halt all pipeline operations and shut down several of its systems. The attackers, identified as a criminal gang known as DarkSide, threatened to leak proprietary information unless a ransom is paid.

Following President Biden’s address to Congress last night in which he referenced cybersecurity as a priority twice, news is circulating today that the executive order on cybersecurity is imminent. This news comes as a much awaited and long overdue step towards creating standardization and structure around cybersecurity.

The role of the developer has evolved over the past several years. Developers are not only responsible for writing code and releasing new software rapidly but also for securing code. By implementing security in the software development lifecycle, you can reduce risk and cost without slowing down time to production. But the developer role is already stretched so thin and many developers don’t have a background in security.

With the need to produce innovative software faster than ever, and cyberattacks not slowing down, it’s no surprise that, for projects large and small, ensuring the security of your code at every step is key. But if software engineers want to meet these everyday demands with success, it’s important to understand how different security scanning types fit in throughout the development process, and how the needs of your team might impact scans.