In recent years, cyber attacks have been on the rise around the globe. In 2022, the median initial ransom amount rose to $500,000 as more public sectors fell victim to malicious attacks. In Australia, climbing cyber attacks have damaged the country’s vital infrastructure, with lasting and costly consequences. Major industries in Australia — including manufacturing, finance, foreign communications, and the healthcare sector — have been targets of cyber attacks.

The 2021 Log4Shell incident cast a bright light on open source software security — and especially on supply chain security. The 18 months following the incident brought a greater focus on open source software security than at any time in history. Organizations like the OpenSSF, AlphaOmega, and large technology companies are putting considerable resources towards tooling and education. But is open source software security actually improving? And where are efforts still falling short?

When working with security teams and application security analysts, the new world of low-code/no-code development presents new questions that invariably begin with ‘where do we start?’ With so many new applications, automations, and more that are introduced to the corporate environment, it can seem like an endless pit of concerns about data flows, user permissions and potential security risks introducing my organization that need to be analyzed and brought under management.

Modern enterprises are fraught with dangers and vulnerabilities that were rare even a decade ago. Cyber threats are becoming more frequent and sophisticated, and even the most secure organizations are falling victim to their attacks. In this landscape, a proactive security stance is crucial. That is where the 3Rs of enterprise security — Rotate, Repave, and Repair — offer your organization a critical advantage.

The financial services sector is one of the highest performing in terms of cybersecurity. One factor that contributes to this performance is regulation. Laws such as FFIEC IT, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, NYDFS, GDPR, and SOC2 have placed pressure on financial services companies to build and enforce some of the strongest cyber risk management programs across any industry. You should consider another factor, which is money.

IBM Security has released its annual Cost of a Data Breach Report, revealing that the global average cost of a data breach reached $4.45 million in 2023. This marks a significant increase of 15% over the past 3 years, making it the highest recorded cost in the history of the report. Notably, detection and escalation costs have seen a substantial rise of 42% during the same period, indicating a shift towards more complex breach investigations.

On July 24th, 2023, Ivanti released a security advisory detailing a remote authentication bypass vulnerability (CVE-2023-35078) affecting Ivanti Endpoint Manager Mobile. This vulnerability, with a CVSS score of 10, allows unauthenticated access to specific API paths, which could allow a threat actor to obtain personal identifiable information (PII) such as names, phone numbers, and other mobile device details.

While perhaps new to AI researchers, supply chain attacks are nothing new to the world of cybersecurity. For those in the know, it has been best practice to verify the source and authenticity of downloads, package repositories, and containers. But human nature usually wins. As developers, our desire to move quickly to improve ease of use for users and customers can cause us to delay efforts to validate the software supply chain until we are forced to by our peers in compliance or security organizations.

Reducing vulnerabilities in your software means manual and automated secure code reviews. Download our handy cheat sheet to keep your review practice on track.