We won’t start yet another blog yammering about how bad the consequences of an attack are. There’s a lot on the line, including both financial and reputational losses. You get it. We get it. Cybercriminals definitely get it. Another thing cybercriminals get is automation. Attacks are up and their rise is expected to continue, in no small part due to the fact that attackers are using automation to scale their criminal enterprises.
A Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) is a detailed, machine-readable, nested list of all of the third-party components and their dependencies that compose a modern software product. SBOMs have particular importance in the health, finance, critical infrastructure, and military sectors, and in mergers and acquisitions, but all industries and applications can benefit from them. SBOMs have been around for over a decade but they’ve gained serious traction in the wake of the SolarWinds breach.
Modern enterprise software is typically composed of some custom code and an increasing amount of third-party components, both closed and open source. These third-party components themselves very often get some of their functionality from other third-party components. The totality of all of the vendors and repositories from which these components (and their dependencies) come make up a large part of the software supply chain.