In the race for technological innovation, companies often sprint toward product launches but find themselves in a marathon when fixing vulnerabilities. This dichotomy poses a significant challenge, especially with the ever-increasing security loopholes. CISA recommends addressing critical issues in less than 15 days, but it may be wishful thinking. IT teams are inundated with an ever-increasing volume of security alerts, making it challenging to prioritize and address each one effectively.

In this new series, CJ May shares his expertise in implementing secure-by-design software processes. The second part of his DevSecOps program is all about implementing secure-by-design software pipelines.

Developers are responsible for mitigating risk of web applications through secure software development. This requires a culture of secure software development, which can be promoted with tactics that engage developers in the security process.

Software Composition Analysis (SCA) tools have been around since 2002, and they are now more critical than ever for identifying vulnerabilities in your codebase's libraries, frameworks, and third-party components. According to a Capterra report, 61% of businesses have been affected by a supply chain threat in the last year. If you’re one of the lucky 39%, Capterra suggests it really came down to luck - as nearly all companies use at least one third-party vendor.

In the famous book “Code Complete,” published by Microsoft Press, author Steve McConnel emphasized the importance of writing code for people first and computers second for better code readability. This was in 1993, when cyber attacks were practically non-existent. Fast forward to 2023, we have a greater challenge: writing code for tackling hackers first and users second.  This challenge is compounded by the rise of cybersecurity incidents due to security vulnerabilities in code.

The OWASP Top 10 list is the go-to resource to begin understand application security risk for software developers and information security professionals. Most of us don't know we're harboring vulnerabilities in plain sight. During 2020 and 2021, there were an average of 15 vulnerabilities per site, and two out of these fifteen vulnerabilities were of high severity. ‍To protect against vulnerabilities, you first need to be aware of them. That’s where the OWASP Top 10 list comes in handy.

By now, you have probably heard about the recently discovered backdoor into versions 5.6.0 and 5.6.1 of the tarballs of the xz utilities, a popular compression/decompression library for xz files, which provides unauthorized remote access under certain conditions. This vulnerability was reported under CVE-2024-3094. Andres Freund, of Microsoft, who discovered the vulnerability, summarized it well.

Shipping secure code rapidly and at scale is a challenge across the software industry, as evidenced by continued news of high-profile data breaches and critical vulnerabilities. To address this challenge, organizations are increasingly adopting DevSecOps, a practice in which application developers work closely alongside operations and security teams throughout the development life cycle.

We recently wrote about npm audit fix, which is an add-on to the excellent npm audit, that has become a fundamental tool for managing software packages in Node.js projects. However, developers working with other languages also require specialized tools for Software Composition Analysis (SCA). At Jit, our tool of choice for SCA scanning across a diversity of programming languages is OSV Scanner, a best of breed OSS solution maintained by Google.

If over 40 major banks can be the target of JavaScript injection attacks, let’s be honest – so can you. In 2023, a malware campaign using this attack method affected 50,000 user sessions across more than 40 financial institutions worldwide, leaving many dev teams in pure damage-control mode. A large number of professional developers (especially front-end developers) use JavaScript more often than any other programming language.