On March 29th, it was reported that malicious code enabling unauthorized remote SSH access has been detected within XZ Utils, a widely used package present in major Linux distributions (The GitHub project originally hosted here is now suspended). Fortunately, the malicious code was discovered quickly by the OSS community and managed to infect only two of the most recent versions of the package, 5.6.0 and 5.6.1, which were released within the past month.

In today’s fast-paced software development landscape, managing and securing the software supply chain is crucial for delivering reliable and trusted software releases. With that in mind, it’s important to assess whether your organization is set up to handle the continuous expansion of the open-source ecosystem and an ever-growing array of tools to incorporate into your supply chain.

Several months ago, Darcy Clarke, a former Staff Engineering Manager at GitHub, discovered the “Manifest Confusion” bug in the npm ecosystem. The bug was caused by the npm registry not validating whether the manifest file contained in the tarball (package.json) matches the manifest data published to the npm server. Clarke claims this to be a large threat, allowing malicious actors to deceive developers and hide harmful code from detection.

Trust is vital to success in our industry. Whether you’re creating and managing software for use internally, by other businesses, or direct-to-consumer, you need to be able to create trust with your end users. This can be accomplished, in part, by showing evidence of security measures, bringing the right people and tactics to the table, and working collaboratively to address challenges.