Although it’s the holiday season, the festive spirit doesn’t extend to cyber attackers, who consider this a great opportunity to cause havoc. But the Mend research team doesn’t rest, and remains alert for threats and vulnerabilities. Our vigilant team has detected an attack on npm packages that utilized typosquatting to compromise nearly 300 NPM packages. Let’s take a look at the nature of the attack and what we did to protect our systems and our users.

Software applications are the weakest link when it comes to the security of the enterprise stack. In The State of Application Security, 2022, Forrester reports that the majority of external attacks occur either by exploiting a software vulnerability (35 percent) or through a web application (32 percent). Source: Forrester: The State of Application Security 2022

When it comes to open source vulnerabilities, we seem to be in permanent growth mode. Indeed, data from Mend’s Open Source Risk Report showed 33 percent growth in the number of open source software vulnerabilities that Mend added to its vulnerability database in the first nine months of 2022 compared with the same time period in 2021. However, while some vulnerabilities pose a severe business risk — hello, log4j — others can be safely ignored.

It stands to reason that if you’ve implemented a Static Application Security Testing (SAST) tool, you’ll want to reap the full value of the investment. But to accurately assess ROI, you need metrics that can evaluate factors such as overall results, KPI compliance, and timeframe. Only then can you estimate whether you’re making a real improvement to the security of your code base, and from that, assess the monetary value of these results.

Sudden, unexpected, and potentially very damaging. Zero-day attacks are the perfect storm for malicious actors and one of the worst-case scenarios for developers, security professionals, and DevOps teams. Yet it’s not all bad news for those charged with protecting your code, software, and applications, as long as you expect the unexpected and prepare for it. Building a fast, effective mitigation response for zero-day attacks starts with these three tactics.

One of the most important steps of securing your code base, your software, and your applications, is to update the dependencies they rely on. In principle, maintaining software health with updates demands that you use recent versions of any software and dependencies. Recent updates are less likely to be exploited and attacked via publicly known vulnerabilities than older versions, because with the latter, malicious actors have had more time to hunt for weaknesses.

This is the final of a six-part blog series that highlights findings from a new Mend white paper, Five Principles of Modern Application Security Programs. When thinking of adjectives to describe cyberattackers, it’s doubtful that many people would choose to call them innovative – a term we’re more likely to ascribe to things we enjoy. But the reality is that adversaries are innovative, constantly finding new ways to launch attacks that result in greater rewards for less effort.

First started as an open-source project in 2018, Mend Renovate automates open source dependency updates in software projects. Renovate has enabled a diverse user base across github.com and gitlab.com, reducing risk by mitigating security vulnerabilities and saving developers’ time. Renovate is now endorsed by OpenSSF and Google as the industry standard tool for dependency updates.

Modern organizations are adopting a cloud-native approach to their application development. While this approach provides many benefits, it also makes organizations face several challenges, including the challenge of securing the application with a completely different approach. In this blog, we will discuss how software changes and how organizations should think about securing it.

‘Tis the season for a busy weekend of software supply chain attacks. Over the past three days, the Mend research team identified two separate attacks that published malicious packages to npm. Mend Supply Chain Defender quickly identified the malicious code; the owners were notified, and the packages were removed. That does not fully remove the risk, however. The first package has 9.5 million downloads, while account CI keys were compromised in the second, which can cause significant damage.