Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Are you fascinated with cryptography? You're not alone: a lot of engineers are. Occasionally, some of them decide to go as far as to write their own custom cryptographic hash functions and use them in real-world applications. While understandably enticing, doing so breaks the number 1 rule of the security community: don't write your own crypto. How do hashing algorithms work and what's special about password hashing? What does it take for an algorithm to get ready for widespread production use?

In volume 11 of our annual State of Software Security (SOSS) report, we uncovered some valuable nuggets of information about how you, the innovative developers of our world, can craft more secure code. For example, did you know that scanning via API improves the time to remediate 50 percent of security flaws by about 17 days, or that C++ and PHP languages have an alarmingly high number of severe security flaws and need greater attention?

It’s been a stressful year, to say the least, for the government and education sector. Government organizations were challenged with pivoting their operations to a digital model while schools were forced to decide between hybrid or remote learning programs for their students. The rise of digital operations has made application security (AppSec) more important than ever.

In our first blog in this series, Nature vs. Nurture Tip 1: Using SAST With DAST, we discussed how this year’s State of Software Security (SOSS) report looked at how both “nature” and “nurture” contribute to the time it takes to close out a security flaw. We found that the “nature” of applications – like size or age – can have a negative effect on how long it takes to remediate a security flaw.

On November 19, Veracode published new, official Docker images for use in continuous integration pipelines. The images, which provide access to Pipeline Scan, Policy (or Sandbox) scans, and the ability to access Veracode APIs via the Java API Wrapper or via HTTPie with the Veracode API Signing tool, make it easy to include the current version of Veracode tools in your automation workflow.