Chris Wysopal, Veracode Co-Founder and CTO, recently sat down with Tom Field, ISMG Senior Vice President of Editorial, for an executive interview at the RSA Conference 2021 to discuss if digital transformations are making application security (AppSec) “headless.”
Chris Wysopal, Co-Founder and CTO at Veracode, and Joshua Corman, Chief Strategist of Healthcare and COVID at CISA, presented at the 2021 RSA Conference on AppSec’s future and the need for a new Chief Product Security Officer (CPSO) role. Wysopal started by quoting entrepreneur Marc Andreessen saying, “Software is eating the world,” to express just how much we rely on technology. From our iPhones and laptops to our cars and even our refrigerators … software is everywhere.
Who’s responsible for security? Milton Friedman once said “When everybody owns something, nobody owns it, and nobody has a direct interest in maintaining or improving its condition.” While that quote was about physical buildings 40 years ago, it’s still relevant to how we build software today. The technology required to shift security left exists but the organizational shifts are lagging behind.
Technological innovation doesn’t slow down when it comes to software, but neither do cyberattacks. The rapid pace of modern programming brings the need for agility and security that can scale and improve to meet business needs. Organizations that want to keep up with innovation while staying secure need more than just capable tools in their tech stacks; having the right people in the right seats to champion your security efforts throughout the development process is also key.
Verizon recently published its 2021 Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR). This year, Verizon analyzed 79,635 incidents, of which 29,207 met their quality standards and 5,258 were confirmed data breaches, from 88 countries around the world. Despite the global pandemic, the DBIR uncovered that cybercrime continued to thrive. Like previous years, the majority of breaches were financially motivated, and most were caused by external actors illegally accessing data.
Application development has changed, and development teams have begun supporting a model of rapid and frequent deployments to support the pace of innovation demanded by digital transformation. From an application security perspective, this means scaling through DevSecOps and supporting developer-first security. The unique challenges and solutions for shifting to DevSecOps were the subject of a recent roundtable discussion featuring Aner Mazur, Chief Product Officer at Snyk and Christer Edvartsen, Sr.
Last night, the Biden administration released an executive order on cybersecurity that includes new security requirements for software vendors selling software to the U.S. government. These requirements include security testing in the development process and a bill of materials for the open source libraries in use, so known vulnerabilities are disclosed and able to be tracked in the future. Without following these standards, companies will not be able to sell software to the federal government.
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.
As we look to improve the quality and capabilities of the JFrog DevOps Platform, especially in the world of DevSecOps, we have added powerful new features to further enhance the award-winning JFrog Xray. The capabilities detailed below cement Xray’s position as a universal software composition analysis (SCA) solution trusted by developers and DevSecOps teams globally to quickly and continuously identify open source software vulnerabilities and license compliance violations.
