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.

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.

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.

Modern software development is full of security risk. Factors like lingering security debt, insecure open source libraries, and irregular scanning cadences can all impact how many flaws dawdle in your code, leading to higher rates of dangerous bugs in susceptible and popular languages.

All security flaws should be fixed, right? In an ideal world, yes, all security flaws should be fixed as soon as they’re discovered. But for most organizations, fixing all security flaws isn’t feasible. A practical step your organization can – and should – take is to prioritize which flaws should be fixed first.

If you caught part one of our recap series on this year’s Collision conference, you know we covered a roundtable talk hosted by Veracode’s own Chris Wysopal. The talk focused on the risks of AI and machine learning, delving into discussions of how to manage the security aspects of these future-ready technologies — especially when it comes down to consumer privacy.

This week, Collision (virtually) kicked off its annual conference, bringing together creatives, builders, influencers, innovators, and other great minds to cover some of the hottest topics in business and technology. Known as ‘America’s fastest-growing tech conference,’ this year Collision featured over 450 speakers with more than 100 hours of content to consume across the three-day event.