staging-devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Tag: devsecops

  • Five Great DevOps Job Opportunities

    Five Great DevOps Job Opportunities

    staging-devopsy.kinsta.cloud is now providing a weekly DevOps jobs report through which opportunities for DevOps professionals will be highlighted to better serve our audience.

    Our goal in these challenging economic times is to make it easier for DevOps professionals to advance their careers.

    Of course, the pool of available DevOps talent is still relatively constrained, so when one DevOps professional takes on a new role it tends to create an opportunity for others.

    The five job postings shared this week are selected based on the company looking to hire, the vertical industry segment and, naturally, the pay scale being offered.

    We’re also committed to providing additional insights into the state of the DevOps job market. In the meantime, for your consideration:

    LinkedIn

    CVS Health
    Remote
    Lead Director – Enterprise Digital Security
    $140,000 to $280,000

    Indeed.com

    Splunk
    Remote
    DevOps and Observability Assigned Expert
    $143,200 to $196,900

    SimplyHired

    Book of the Month
    New York, New York
    Senior DevOps Engineer
    $140,000 to $180,000

    Monster.com

    Innova Solutions
    Plano, Texas
    DevOps Engineer
    $110,000 to $130,000

    Dice.com

    Solaris Finserv
    Kennesaw, Georgia
    DevOps Engineer
    $100,000 to $120,000

  • DevSecOps Provides a Modern Security Model for Modernization

    DevSecOps Provides a Modern Security Model for Modernization

    Developers and security experts are now tasked with bolstering, extending and adjusting cloud and Kubernetes security to protect against cyberattacks that are ever more complex, volatile, and frequent. To foil attacks and create a secure foundation for applications and infrastructure from the beginning, DevSecOps (development, security and operations) has become the trending development and operations practice. In the DevSecOps model, security becomes a shared responsibility. Thus, DevSecOps requires a mindset shift to enable collaboration between development, security and operations teams. This shift, commonly referred to as shift left, involves culture, processes and tools. With DevSecOps, whether it’s testing for security vulnerabilities or building security services that can be used directly for business purposes, the goal for all participants is to build security into applications from the start and throughout the continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) workflow of DevOps.

    DevSecOps to the Rescue

    In the past, security considerations and practices were often introduced at the end of the development cycle by a separate security team and tested by a separate (QA) team. This was manageable when software updates were released every few months or even years. But in today’s landscape, consumer habits and expectations are shaped by smartphones and digital commerce, which has fueled the demand for software services that are real-time and available 24/7. This requires modern enterprises to find ways to improve the efficiency of application developments, releases, and updates.

    Because of these factors, enterprises realize that security can no longer be a small part of an afterthought in the production environment. The purpose of DevSecOps is to ensure that through collaboration, security can be carried through to every point in the development cycle. This enables teams and enterprises to deliver secure, high-quality applications in a more efficient manner without extensive security checks and fixes occurring during post-production.

    To meet these more extreme demands, cloud computing, containers, and microservices have made it possible to accelerate the development and delivery of software releases. Developers adopting agile and DevOps practices can reduce software development cycles to days and weeks, thus meeting the diverse needs of enterprises and users.

    This fast-paced development and upgrade frequency has created new security concerns and the need for companies to be more agile in responding to security issues. DevSecOps has been introduced into the DevOps framework to meet these needs by make security a shared responsibility. Today, continuous testing and integration, including security scanning of pipelines, is becoming the norm.

    DevSecOps Business Benefits

    In principle, DevSecOps shares the DevOps ideal of multiple teams working together to improve team efficiency and achieve secure, continuous software delivery.

    In addition to the security benefits DevSecOps provides, there are significant business advantages to be gained, including:
    ● Efficiency–Under the DevSecOps practice, security is integrated into all periods of development to help all teams be more agile in responding to security risks, eliminating the need for teams to spend a lot of time tweaking and fixing during the production cycle.
    ● Cost reduction–By discovering security vulnerabilities before they enter production, organizations and teams can significantly reduce the time and labor costs of fixing them.
    ● Ensure compliance–DevSecOps can ensure compliance with industry-standard regulations, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). DevSecOps gives teams a holistic overview of these measures that makes compliance easier.
    ● Establishes collaborative culture–Integrating security practices into DevOps enhances the value of DevOps and improves the overall security posture as a culture of shared responsibility. When everyone is involved in the process, it increases their awareness of security fundamentals and best practices and provides a sense of ownership in the results.

    Meeting New DevOps Challenges

    Kubernetes offers many advantages but also poses unique security challenges that can be difficult to address for organizations lacking in Kubernetes talent and experience. This is why organizations will increasingly see the need to reevaluate their security practices and prioritize a more advanced security-focused culture.

    Because DevSecOps requires security to be addressed throughout all development stages, it requires developers to have security expertise while coding and operating. We are currently seeing a growing skills gap in the DevOps industry, and developers are feeling burned out. Security training is a way for teams adopting DevSecOps to acquire additional knowledge.

    Deploying Kubernetes platforms with security built in by default also will be recognized as a means to reduce the burden of security on IT teams. This will reduce the pressure and burnout on all sides.

    Platform Engineering Provides Additional Help

    With the rapid development of Kubernetes and cloud-native applications, organizations are realizing the inadequacies of their IT teams to leverage DevOps practices. Just as platform engineering eases the burden of DevOps by providing an Internal Development Platform (IDP) that serves as a “golden path” for developers, an IDP can simplify the practice of DevSecOps.

    We’ve seen that a DevOps workload is difficult to practice in small and medium-sized enterprises, as well as in large enterprises that lack sufficient talent. The gradually accumulated cognitive load ultimately leads to a less agile and efficient collaboration between teams. Given these issues, more organizations will adopt platform engineering as a better alternative.

  • Good Things Happen When DevSecOps and Cloud Collide

    Good Things Happen When DevSecOps and Cloud Collide

    The marriage of cloud and software development is arguably the heart and soul of digital transformation. Providing pathways to greater efficiencies, lower costs and greater enterprise performance, the duo is poised to fundamentally transform industries as we know them. The compounding complexities of hybrid cloud operations and software supply chains, however, have led to a greater risk of vulnerabilities, errors and attacks.

    Increasingly wrapped around microservices, containers and orchestration platforms, the complexities of cloud expansion and software development couldn’t be more intertwined or expose more complicated risks than they do today.

    Software: A World of Consistent Change

    The state of software development is one of consistent change. Whether we call it agile or adaptive matters far less than the need to infuse operations with a new mindset and culture about the need for continuous development. Increasingly that includes the infusion of security disciplines and technologies directly into the main artery of that development.

    Enter DevSecOps, an approach to software that integrates security initiatives at every stage of the software development lifecycle to deliver high-performing secure applications.

    The cause is not lost on the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and its cybersecurity center of excellence (NCCoE) which has announced a DevSecOps project dedicated to “developing and documenting an applied risk-based approach and recommendations for secure DevOps and software supply chain practices consistent with the secure software development framework (SSDF), cybersecurity supply chain risk management (C-SCRM), and other NIST, government, and industry guidance.”

    This is a far cry from software development of old. According to CTO Emeritus, Hu Yoshida, “Software, once the product of developers confined to writing long lines of code for specific applications, is now an exercise of integration – an amalgamation of third-party components provided by a variety of vendors, cloud providers, and open source software (OSS) groups. In fact, today, as much as 90% of code comes from such outlets, creating a software supply chain.”

    Although these new processes provide great advantages in terms of access to innovation and faster development cycles, the addition of external touchpoints and third-party software increases the risk of flaws, mistakes, and vulnerabilities. These risks only rise further when considering their deployment, usage, and management across complex hybrid cloud environments.

    How to Take Advantage of the Collision

    Cloud-based data is accounting for 39% of successful cyberattacks. Containerized applications, which have been a boon to both migration and management can also lead to vulnerabilities – which is fitting for security to be cited as a top concern for more than half of the organizations surveyed.

    From business continuity to business performance, organizations must begin assuming a security posture that considers the rising confluence of cloud management and software development.

    The idea is simple: You must find a way, a process, a method, and the right partners to help secure all workloads across any cloud environment, regardless of the platform or the amount of data and application real estate needed.

    By establishing this model, organizations are able to create a fundamental layer of protection against the ever-evolving threat of cybercriminals. Take one of our large banking customers, for example, who runs critical applications on AWS with stringent security and compliance requirements. We implemented a secured framework to protect their applications running on modern, cloud-native services like containers and Lambda functions using DevSecOps principles and cloud-native SIEM solutions. This enables them to scale their business in the cloud without worrying about compliance violations.

    One of our large pharmaceutical customers with a very large presence in both AWS and Azure experienced challenges keeping their cloud security posture in pace with the growing business demands on the cloud, increasing risk to the environment. By establishing a security process using cloud security posture management, we were able to significantly reduce cloud misconfigurations and auto-remediate several cloud vulnerabilities proactively to improve the security posture of the environment.

    The bottom line is that building security into the workloads will provide a fundamental layer of protection. The collision of cloud and DevSecOps is real. Organizations would be wise to realize it and take advantage of it to dramatically improve business performance and resiliency.

  • Survey: More Cybersecurity Pros Embedded in DevOps Teams

    Survey: More Cybersecurity Pros Embedded in DevOps Teams

    A survey of 2,500 C-level executives published today by Palo Alto Networks found 81% of organizations have embedded cybersecurity professionals within their DevOps teams.

    Despite the presence of those cybersecurity professionals, however, the survey also suggested there is much work to do in terms of optimizing DevSecOps workflows. A full 90% of organizations cannot detect, contain and resolve cybersecurity threats within an hour, the survey found.

    Bob West, chief security officer for Palo Alto Networks, said most of the challenges associated with DevSecOps are directly related to persistent cloud security issues. More than three-quarters of organizations (78%) said they had distributed responsibility for cloud security, but almost half (47%) said a majority of their workforce still does not understand their security responsibilities.

    In many cases, developers with little to no cybersecurity expertise are responsible for provisioning cloud infrastructure. As a result, misconfigurations that create security issues are commonplace, noted West. That’s especially problematic because three-quarters of organizations (75%) are deploying new or updated code to production weekly, with almost 40% committing new code daily, the survey found. Given that developers far outnumber cybersecurity professionals in most organizations, it remains challenging to ensure application code is secure, noted West.

    In addition to improving the overall state of cloud security, organizations need to focus on fundamentals such as training developers to be more mindful of cybersecurity issues, he added. Most developers never had any formal cybersecurity training, so it’s up to organizations to make sure that particular skills gap is closed, he noted. In addition, organizations need to make sure they have a robust set of patch management processes in place alongside a capability to manage permissions and entitlements, added West.

    Overall, the survey found organizations are using more than 30 security tools, on average, including six to 10 dedicated to cloud security. More than three-quarters of respondents (76%) said relying on multiple security tools created blind spots that affected their ability to prioritize risk and prevent threats. A full 80% said they would benefit from a centralized security solution that sits across all of their cloud accounts and services.

    One way or another, a rising tide of regulations focused on improving the security of software supply chains will force organizations to improve cloud security, said West. The survey showed there is a strong commitment in terms of making cybersecurity professionals an integral part of a DevOps workflow. The issue is that there are still a raft of training and process issues that need to be addressed at a time when cybercriminals are becoming increasingly adept at compromising applications both as they are developed and after they are deployed.

    Of course, training and modifying processes take time. DevSecOps is as much about changing culture as it is about acquiring new tools. DevOps teams are still highly committed to building and deploying applications as quickly as possible. The challenge is finding a way to insert a set of cybersecurity gates within those workflows without slowing down the pace at which applications are developed.

  • Benefits and Challenges of DevSecOps for Business

    Benefits and Challenges of DevSecOps for Business

    Almost every day, there is a new tactic or technique discovered that hackers can use to disrupt a company’s systems, obtain critical data and information or steal money. Often attackers look to exploit vulnerabilities in code to carry out their attacks. Ironically, it’s usually a small piece of code that helps a business perform very simple tasks that can become the root of this serious issue (e.g., logging, report service and glue for application). In fact, it only takes one exploitation, vulnerability or human error to cause a data breach that, on average, costs $4.35 million. Some experts projected that by 2025, these breaches could cost a total of $10.5 trillion. Therefore, CEOs and other corporate executives should reflect on these incidents to ask themselves what would happen if someone entered their systems to exploit code and what it could mean for their company.

    The Problems That a Business Faces

    In traditional development practices, security serves a ‘gating’ function. Security checks are performed prior to releasing an application to production and, if issues are found, security stops rollouts. This can have disastrous ramifications.

    The unknown can be frightening, but that’s where DevSecOps can help. DevSecOps incorporates security into every step of the software development life cycle (SDLC) from requirements to architecture and design, coding, testing, release and deployment. By automating and integrating security practices into the software development life cycle, development teams can react to vulnerabilities sooner, automate security checks and proceed into production with a more reliable and secure product.

    The benefit is felt when a tactical vulnerability is discovered and the DevSecOps practice is already in place to ensure that it can be remediated with limited impact on the business.

    The Business Benefits of DevSecOps and Best Practices

    Streamlining the SDLC and including security checks (often automated) in the process early in the development cycle can identify a problem before it can negatively affect the bottom line of the development effort and the business. Having a vulnerability remediated early in the development cycle is an order of magnitude less expensive than one discovered just prior to production.

    DevSecOps works best in an organization where Agile practices have been adopted to swiftly enable continuous integration, deployment and scalability. The road to streamlining and automating these practices can be long, but when effectively applied, DevSecOps best practices reduce costs for the company and accelerates time to market.

    For DevSecOps to be effective, security must have a seat at the table when requirements are gathered and architectures are planned. This integration of work practices ensures that risks are identified early and can be mitigated well before an application is launched in production.

    Using that same connection with operations, security procedures should be established to feed new vulnerability discoveries into the pipeline for remediation. However, implementing DevSecOps isn’t a magic fix and it won’t happen immediately. But why can it be so hard to implement?

    Overcoming the Challenges of DevSecOps

    There are many difficulties when it comes to implementing DevSecOps. Here are two of them:

    1. Cultural Shift:
    Leading with a DevSecOps approach requires a huge culture shift within the organization that challenges the way many departments operate today. Many employees might find it difficult to drastically change what they’ve been doing for years. Another roadblock is the belief that better protection slows down processes and restricts innovation. Quick code production is a goal for developers who want to meet the demands of businesses, while on the other hand, security teams are focused on making sure the code is secure.

    Thorough training for both security and development experts will help overcome some cultural obstacles but integrating the goals and objectives of both teams will push the adoption of DevSecOps practices. Organizations will begin to see security align to faster time and flexibility of solutions while developers will begin to adopt a security-first mindset.

    2. Complex Tool Integrations:
    Most DevOps toolchains are produced by different vendors. Teams select source code management, continuous integration/delivery (CI/CD), build tools, binary libraries, code review and problem monitoring solutions based on their unique needs. Adding security tools into that pipeline can create a challenge for ensuring the best results for both teams.

    Security analysis in the development pipeline is done with tools that perform software composition analysis (SCA), static application security testing (SAST), and some form of dynamic testing. Integration into the pipeline of these tools is significant and creates difficulties for developers. The developer must know the intent of the scan and what to do with the problems they uncover. It is important that developers have an accurate understanding of where the problem arose and what the issues mean. However, combining and comparing the results and data of many vendors’ resources might be challenging.

    The best course of action would be to consolidate your solutions. This will not only make things simpler for the developer and the organization, but it may also reveal threats that the organization wasn’t previously aware of.

    Overcoming these obstacles is not an easy task, but it is possible. Once a DevSecOps approach is accepted and fully implemented across your company, you can expect code to be developed with fewer bugs and security risks. The cost of deploying code will also eventually decrease, and at a pace that helps the organization maximize its return on investment. Overall, systems created within this process will be significantly more flexible and capable of adjusting to modern-day threats and change in the midst of a digital transformation.

  • Leveraging Automation for Secure, Cost-Effective Mobile App Delivery

    Leveraging Automation for Secure, Cost-Effective Mobile App Delivery

    As businesses mobilize their customers and employees, they need to develop innovative mobile applications that safeguard user trust. But secure mobile development and manual security testing can be expensive and time-consuming—a bigger challenge in slowing economies. However, the latest innovations in security automation for mobile teams can drive down security costs by half while speeding release time, getting quality mobile apps to market faster to grow revenue faster.

    With mobile dominating all digital time spent online versus the web, businesses cannot compromise the safety of their mobile users and mobile data. Security automation integrated throughout the development process empowers developer, QA and security teams’ efficiency, enabling faster release cycles with built-in security. This approach powers success for digitally enabled businesses that depend on mobile apps to generate revenue, engage customers and tap new markets.

    A single security vulnerability within a mobile app can instantly damage a business’s financial stability, brand reputation and customer trust. Even highly respected brands like UnderArmour and British Airways experienced serious issues after their mobile apps were breached. Business leaders should consider the benefits of adding security automation directly into the development pipeline to drive quality and protect users in a cost-effective manner.

    Faster, Lower Cost Developer Cycles

    Suppose a business creates a 12-week plan to develop, test and release a mobile app software update with a labor budget of $60,000 per week. The development team creates a schedule to write the code in 10 weeks and allocates a two-week period for a manual security pentest. After developers finish writing the code, they must wait for the pentest results to point out any security issues. When testing uncovers security issues, devs, security analysts and QAs must determine which issues need to be remediated. Then the devs can fix the issue, retest to ensure it is properly fixed, then release it. Most of the time, finding any issues delays the release by weeks or months, delaying the expected revenue generation and other business benefits by weeks or months, in turn.

    Instead, businesses can take a cost-effective approach by running security automation continuously through the development life cycle. Dev teams can write code, allow security automation to run during off hours, and have tickets with built-in remediation info sent back to devs the next day. This can remove weeks of testing and remediation delays to ensure teams release on time and on budget. Businesses can cut costs further by establishing common coding, testing and remediation policies in advance and then deploying an automated policy engine to focus on just those security requirements and issues relevant to the policy to operate at the fastest pace possible.

    Integrating automated security testing into development tools enables DevSecOps teams to build, test, fix and release faster with security built in. Not only does this strategy increase the security and quality of the mobile app, it drastically lowers development costs by improving team efficiency.

    Faster, Lower Cost Security Testing Cycles

    Every organization with a mobile app has different security requirements. Those with low-risk mobile apps may outsource their security testing once or twice a year. Those in highly regulated industries like healthcare and financial services may have internal security analysts and test as often as every release and event outsource pen testing quarterly. Whether testing internally or externally, security testing costs can become a major pain point for companies looking to manage their finances efficiently.

    The average cost of a full-scope, two-week outsourced manual pentest costs around $15,000 to $20,000 per test. If an organization tests its mobile app on a quarterly basis, its pentesting costs jump to $60,000 to $80,000 per year. Internal pentesting teams can potentially be cheaper, but organizations still need to pay for analysts’ salaries and the tools and resources they need to conduct tests. Whether a business has an internal security team or relies on outsourced manual pentests, leveraging security automation can significantly reduce costs.

    Businesses with internal security teams can use automation to test builds immediately after devs release code. By continuously assessing code quality from start to finish, security teams can eliminate their testing time and speed up release cycles. Businesses that outsource security testing can use security automation to cut costs by reducing the frequency of full-scope manual pentests. Instead of testing on a biannual or quarterly basis, continuous automation can help reduce the testing frequency to once or twice a year with comparable coverage.

    The most efficient approach possible is the hybrid security automation approach of guided testing that combines daily automated security testing as mobile apps are built with periodic human security analysts for coverage of the parts of the mobile app that automation can’t cover. Guided testing starts below $20,000 per mobile app for unlimited automated security testing integrated into DevSecOps toolchain with four periodic guided tests per year, slashing outsourced quarterly pentesting costs by more than 75%.

    Mobile apps play an important role in helping businesses generate much-needed revenue, but running fast and cutting corners without security built in ultimately places the business and users at risk. So business leaders should take extra steps to keep them secure, and securing mobile apps can be achieved without breaking the bank. By incorporating security automation and innovations like guided testing into the mobile app development process, businesses can maximize the speed of delivery while simultaneously reducing costs and improving quality.

  • Appdome Integrates Mobile Security Platform With CircleCI CI/CD

    Appdome Integrates Mobile Security Platform With CircleCI CI/CD

    Appdome this week made available an integration for the continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform from CircleCI that promises to make it simpler to secure mobile applications before they are deployed.

    As a provider of a platform for securing mobile applications running on iOS and Android platforms, Appdome provides a runtime application self-protection (RASP) platform that, among other capabilities, provides code obfuscation, mobile data encryption, jailbreak detection, root detection, man-in-the-middle attack prevention, on-device anti-malware, anti-fraud, anti-cheat and anti-bot capabilities.

    The platform is now integrated with the Circle CI/CD platform via the Orb framework created by CircleCI to simplify integrations with third-party tools.

    Karen Hsu, senior vice president of mobile DevOps and security solutions for Appdome, said the Appdome Build_2Secure Orb for CircleCI is an example of a series of integrations the company plans to make involving DevOps tools and platform that will make it easier to apply DevSecOps best practices to the deployment of mobile applications. That’s critical because it’s not uncommon for teams using different DevOps platforms and tools to be involved in the development of the same application, she noted.

    A recent Appdome survey suggested consumers are about to force the DevSecOps issue for providers of mobile applications regardless of how mature their processes are. A full 94% of respondents said they would promote a brand if the mobile apps protected them versus 68% that said they’d abandon brands that offered no protection.

    Securing mobile applications is especially challenging because once an application is compromised, it’s relatively trivial for cybercriminals to also inject malicious code into other applications running on a mobile device. There are no automated remediation capabilities, so the best defense is to isolate applications in a way that prevents malware from executing in the first place, noted Hsu. At a time when it’s already clear cybercriminals will be using artificial intelligence (AI) platforms to launch attacks, organizations will not have the time required to remediate vulnerabilities before malware is activated, she added.

    That Appdome approach provides the added benefit of reducing tensions between developers and cybersecurity teams that otherwise would be requesting immediate fixes to mobile applications that have been compromised, noted Hsu. As more mobile applications are built and deployed, the overall goal should be to enable both teams to work collaboratively together without unnecessarily disrupting each other’s workflow, added Hsu.

    It’s not clear what percentage of the applications being built and deployed today are destined to run on mobile devices, but securing those applications clearly presents some unique challenges. Many of those applications are deployed on consumer-grade devices attached to wireless networks that are not especially secure. Cybercriminals are increasingly targeting these devices not only to access sensitive data but also because they often provide a gateway through which the rest of an IT environment can be compromised.

    The simple truth of the matter is, sadly, DevOps teams need to assume that most mobile applications are going to be running in the cybersecurity equivalent of a hostile environment where the odds are considerably stacked against them.

  • Cisco AppDynamics Survey Surfaces DevSecOps Challenges

    Cisco AppDynamics Survey Surfaces DevSecOps Challenges

    A survey of 1,150 large enterprise IT professionals from the AppDynamics unit of Cisco suggested application security progress is being made slowly and steadily as organizations continue to embrace DevSecOps best practices.

    The survey finds that while more than three-quarters of respondents (76%) believe that DevSecOps is essential for organizations to effectively protect against a multi-staged security attack on the full application stack only 43% reported their organization has already started to implement DevSecOps workflows while another 46% said they are currently considering making the shift.

    More than three-quarters of respondents (78%) also said a lack of a shared vision between application development and security teams presents a challenge to application security over the next 12 months. More than half (55%) said they currently considered security to be more of an inhibitor of innovation than an enabler. Nevertheless, 81% admitted a lack of application security skills and resources is now an issue for their organization, with 79% acknowledging that securing the full application stack is now a priority for their organization.

    A full 92% admitted that the rush to rapidly innovate and respond to the changing needs of customers and users during the COVID-19 pandemic has come at the expense of robust application security. Well over half of respondents (58%) also noted their organization often ended up in ‘security limbo’ because they didn’t know what security issues to focus on and prioritize. A total of 88% acknowledged their organization could be doing more to secure the full stack of modern applications across the entire application life cycle.

    Not surprisingly, 93% said it’s important to be able to contextualize security so that they can correlate risk in relation to, for example, application performance, end user experience and business metrics. However, more than two-thirds (68%) reported that their current security solutions work well in silos but not together. A total of 85% stated that cultural changes to support the shift to a DevSecOps approach are important to improve application security.

    AppDynamics Executive CTO Gregg Ostrowski said it is apparent organizations are still wrestling with not just application security technologies but also people and process issues. The most critical issue is to knock down the silos that exist in organizations that often result in one team demonizing another, he added.

    Overall, application security is becoming more challenging as the attack surface expands. A full 89% of technologists reported that their organization experienced an expansion in its attack surfaces over the last two years, with almost half (46%) noting that this expansion is already increasing cybersecurity challenges. One of the primary drives of that expansion as been the rise of the internet-of-things (IoT) applications (59%), rapid adoption of cloud computing platforms (56%) and digital business transformation initiatives (51%).

    On the plus side, more than three-quarters of respondents (76%) said they believe artificial intelligence (AI) will play an increasingly important role in addressing application security challenges. The issue, of course, is how soon those advances might be made at a time when attacks against software supply chains are clearly on the rise.

  • Software Supply Chain Security Debt is Increasing: Here’s How To Pay It Off

    Software Supply Chain Security Debt is Increasing: Here’s How To Pay It Off

    Last year, the world woke up to the software supply chain dilemma. We saw a spike in attacks as hackers sought to exploit known and unknown vulnerabilities within dependencies. There is also the chance of typosquatting, and malicious code commits to consider. Such supply chain attacks have increased by a shocking 742% over the past few years.

    It’s easy to let software security debt accumulate, as it’s cumbersome to stay on top of frequent updates — especially when new releases cause breaking change. Furthermore, companies might unknowingly collect security debt by hastily looping in projects whose origin is unknown. Plugging these gaps can bring a high burden down the road, which too often falls on the shoulders of developers to manage.

    I recently reconnected with Dan Lorenc, founder and CEO of Chainguard, to discover why risks in the software supply chain contribute to increased security debt and how organizations can proverbially pay it off. Lorenc is a key figure behind Sigstore, the open source utility built to verify the provenance of open source packages. Below, we’ll consider the state of software supply chain security and examine some modern solutions that lessen its severity.

    Why is Supply Chain Security Debt Rising?

    Modern software ecosystems are an intricate mosaic of dependencies, and supply chain security concerns often arise at the cracks between them. “It’s about the gaps and hand-off points between individuals in the software life cycle,” said Lorenc. Since these hand-off points can threaten systems at large, they can accumulate considerable security debt if left unguarded.

    Another reason why security debt is increasing, said Lorenc, is that fixing issues is rarely incentivized—it’s always thought of as “someone else’s problem.” Minimizing this debt will require organizations to change this mindset and follow modern security best practices, like implementing multifactor authentication infrastructure and more frequent code reviews. It will also take a coordinated effort from package managers to integrate tooling that helps verify the legitimacy of packages, said Lorenc.

    Solutions to Reduce Software Supply Chain Security Debt

    Automated Vulnerability Scanning

    In addition to advancing internal culture toward greater security awareness, organizations will benefit from automation that enhances the discovery of vulnerabilities. Because when a severe incident like Log4j hits the presses, it’s a mad scramble to respond. Even a year later, one in four downloads still possesses the infamous vulnerability.

    Integrating automated security scanning is the first step to knowing how these incidents impact your security posture. A tool like Snyk can do a great job of surfacing known vulnerabilities and finding where they lie within your software stack and provide remediation advice. Continually checking for updates can also help pay off security debt “as you go” instead of upgrading everything all at once, says Lorenc. But although scanning tools are essential for increasing visibility, they don’t address the root cause of why they are vulnerabilities in these packages in the first place, says Lorenc.

    Checking Transitive Dependencies

    Reports find that 95% of vulnerabilities stem from transitive dependencies. These are dependencies that are buried deep within the dependency tree of another package. And depending on the programming language, they’re not always that visible. The combinatory effect of transitive dependencies can lead to exponentially more vulnerabilities and issues if not carefully tracked. And since they’re running locally with the same privileges as your other packages, you shouldn’t treat these vulnerabilities any differently, said Lorenc. “You need to realize they can affect your application in the same way.”

    Validating The Source

    The link between the package manager and the source code is a frail area that warrants additional verification. Social engineering tricks can effectively trick users into downloading insecure packages that appear safe at the outset yet hide corrupt code. Or, account takeovers can result in attackers inserting malicious code into commonly used open libraries. Package managers often host built versions and forked versions of software produced by the community on GitHub, yet do not validate a clear link to the original repository. This gap heightens the chance for a malicious package to slip through the cracks, says Lorenc.

    This is something that Sigstore, the open standard for signing, verifying and protecting software, aims to accomplish. In mid-2022, Sigstore was implemented within Kubernetes, signaling the adoption of Sigstore as a standard throughout the open source ecosystem. It’s also been adopted by Npm and PyPI and Maven Central will soon support Sigstore as well, said Lorenc. Although some of these moves have received pushback from developers, Lorenc argued that such verification is necessary to help link packages to their source and increase credibility for open source dependencies.

    Chipping Away At Security Debt

    Like technical debt piles up over time, security debt can quickly rise if left unchecked. Chipping away at increasing software supply chain security debt will likely require a “pay as you go” approach wherein developers continuously scan and update their dependencies. One good sign is that people are paying more attention to risks latent within their code, and the industry is discovering and sharing more potential vulnerabilities before they are exploited.

    “Security has advanced, and there are common best practices across the industry,” said Lorenc. But if these practices aren’t followed, it could bring dire consequences for the organizations and the industry as a whole. And although Sigstore can help bridge the disconnect between the package managers and the source code, there are plenty of other techniques to help improve a security footprint for open source software and cloud-native infrastructure. For example, SLSA and greater use of SBOMs can help address security debt more holistically.

    The software supply chain security dilemma is an advanced topic that requires a coordinated effort from various stakeholders to remedy. The important takeaway is to stay positive, see the debt, and pay it off incrementally, says Lorenc.

  • Dynatrace Survey Surfaces State of DevOps in the Enterprise

    Dynatrace Survey Surfaces State of DevOps in the Enterprise

    A global survey of 1,300 CIOs and DevOps managers working for organizations with more than 1,000 employees published today finds more than three-quarters of respondents work for organizations (78%) that deploy software updates into production every 12 hours or less, with more than half (54%) say they do so at least once every two hours. A total of 20% report they are deploying updates every minute or less.

    Conducted by the market research firm Coleman Parkes on behalf of Dynatrace, the survey also finds 90% of respondents reporting that the pace of digital transformation within their organization has accelerated in the past 12 months. More than a quarter (26%) expect the pace of digital transformation to continue to accelerate, the survey found.

    However, 55% of respondents work for organizations that make tradeoffs between quality, security and user experience to meet the need for rapid transformation. A total of 41% of respondents said they must sacrifice code quality and user experience due to meet demands for faster innovation, while more third (34%) also need to sacrifice code security.

    Overall, DevOps teams, on average, spend nearly a third (31%) of their time on manual tasks involving detecting code quality issues and vulnerabilities that conspire to slow the pace of innovation, the survey found.

    To address these issues, organizations plan to increase their spending on automation across development, security and operations by 35% by 2024, as they invest more in continuously testing software quality (54%) and securing production environments (49%), automatic vulnerability detection and blocking (41%) and automating release validation (35%). The average budget allocated to these activities in these large organizations is $9.1 million, the survey finds.

    A full 88% of CIOs said the convergence of observability and security practices will be critical to building a DevSecOps culture, with 94% noting that extending a DevSecOps culture to more teams is key to accelerating digital transformation. Only 27% of respondents claimed to fully adhere to a DevSecOps culture today. The biggest obstacles to achieving that goal are that security teams don’t trust developers (55%), developers perceive security teams to be blockers of innovation (49%) and the silos that exist between teams (36%).

    Organizations expect to increase their annual investment in DevSecOps automation by 2024 an average of 35%, but only a quarter (25%) said applying artificial intelligence to security was a priority. At the same time, only 28% of respondents said they are fully confident applications are fully tested for vulnerabilities before they are deployed.

    A total of 90% said increasing the use of AI for IT operations (AIOps) will be key to scaling up these practices. However, 70% of respondents said they need to improve their trust in the accuracy of AI’s decisions before they can automate more of their continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline.

    Bob Wambach, vice president of product marketing for Dynatrace, said there is a clear correlation between that accelerated pace of digital transformation and a need to deliver more frequent software updates that is driving those investments. Most organizations, however, are going to find it difficult to achieve all their goals unless they break down the silos that prevent them from automating and observing modern DevSevOps workflows, he added. Achieving that goal will also require DevOps teams to reevaluate which platforms they are employing as they move to reduce the current level of friction encountered when building and deploying applications, he added.

    It’s too early to say just how soon DevSevOps workflows will define the next era of software development. One way or another, it’s certain that every organization that embraces DevOps will need to address lingering application security issues.