We’re pleased to announce new functionality within the Snyk Vulnerability Scanner extension for Visual Studio Code, making it easier for developers to find and fix vulnerabilities and license issues in their open source dependencies! To help developers take more responsibility for the security of their applications, security tools must be able to integrate seamlessly into existing workflows and the tools developers are using on a day-to-day basis.

Earlier this month, a group of researchers at the University of Cambridge published an academic paper, with an accompanying website, on a new type of potential vulnerability that could appear in source code. They called it Trojan Source.

As organizations look for solutions that enable them to create a software bill of materials (SBOM) to ensure they’re meeting new governmental mandates for protecting the software supply chain, it’s important to understand the difference between solutions based on reporting vs. remediation. The primary focus of any SBOM solution should be on open source code. The use of open source continues to expand exponentially. Open source components comprise 60%-80% of today’s applications.

I recently had to revamp my home office setup and decided to make a trip to my closest IKEA. The wide range of choices of desks in Micke, Malm, Brusali, Alex, and Bekant was only the beginning of the journey. I knew I had to head back home with the desk, find a good place to unpack the unit, find my screwdrivers, hammer, alan keys, and finally dedicate a few hours of labor to assemble everything. I enjoy the process but it is not devoid of frustrations.

Bandwidth pricing is a major component of the cloud services model. And for a content-heavy service like a video or document store, egress costs can quickly spiral out of control. To mitigate this, it is important to put limits on the amount of data that can be downloaded in a given interval. However, bandwidth limiting for a multi-tenant SaaS product adds a few interesting challenges.

We are thrilled to welcome the team at CloudSkiff to Snyk! Many of you may be more familiar with driftctl, the open source project started by the CloudSkiff team. I wanted to share with you why we’re excited about the addition of this fantastic group of people to Snyk, and our plans for the future of Snyk Infrastructure as Code (Snyk IaC), as well as our commitment to keeping driftctl open source.

A few hours ago, an npm package with more than 7 million weekly downloads was compromised. It appears an ATO (account takeover) occurred in which the author’s account was hijacked either due to a password leakage or a brute force attempt (GitHub discussion).

I’m excited to share that Snyk has joined the Linux Foundation’s expanded support of the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) as a premier member alongside Microsoft, Google, Cisco, Facebook, Intel, VMware, Red Hat, Oracle, and others. As Snyk’s mission is to enable developers to develop fast while staying secure, we believe that this cross-industry collaboration is critical to the future of software development and improving the security of open source.

Securing investors is always a challenge for startups. But for open-source companies, it’s even harder. Open-source companies need the right investors to innovate and enter new markets. But when you deal with a specific subset like open source, it can be difficult to find VCs with the required experience and knowledge. Those of us in the open-source community know it’s not just about the money — it’s also about continuing to grow the community.

Open source intelligence (OSINT) is the process of identifying, harvesting, processing, analyzing, and reporting data obtained from publicly available sources for intelligence purposes. Open source intelligence analysts use specialized methods to explore the diverse landscape of open source intelligence and pinpoint any data that meets their objectives. OSINT analysts regularly discover information that is not broadly known to be accessible to the public.