Supply chain attacks tripled in 2021, meaning a secure software development lifecycle is more important than ever. Do you know what open source software (OSS) components are in use within your organisation? Or how to find out?

Software supply chain risks are escalating. Between 2020 and 2021, bad actors launched nearly 7,000 software supply chain attacks, representing an increase of more than 600%. Without identifying and managing security risks within the supply chain, you could be exposing your critical assets to attacks. Implementing a supply chain risk management strategy is essential to staying ahead of the potential threats and making the most of your software.

As a supply chain security vendor, the growth is far from surprising for us at Bytesafe - with the supply chain being a noticeable security blind spot for many organizations. A massive 62% of organizations claim to have been impacted by supply chain attacks in 2021 alone. Incidents like log4j, ua-parser-js and colors.js/faker.js have once again shown that it’s vital to use services like the Bytesafe Dependency Firewall.

We’ve heard a lot about “supply chains” of various industries over the past couple of years, and the cybersecurity sector is no exception. When Colonial Pipeline was compromised by ransomware, it affected the physical supply of gasoline to consumers. On the software side, malware distributed through a SolarWinds update and vulnerabilities discovered in Apache’s Log4J created rippling effects for organizations around the world.

What happens when the software, scripts and code snippets that your business uses on your website and network have been compromised at the source? The compromise could be unintentional—perhaps the coders simply made a mistake. Or the compromise could be intentional—maybe hackers wrote a malicious script and promoted it as legitimate on a third-party library source to encourage users to download and install.