You probably know the story of “the boy who cried ‘Wolf!’” In the ancient fable, villagers tire of a shepherd’s false alarms, and stop paying attention to them. That’s a lesson for software security teams, not just schoolchildren. Raising concerns about threats that turn out to be flimsy or false erodes the trust that binds your department, and even the faith your customers have in you.

During application development, we often need to persist complex data (like objects) for use in different runtimes. However, maintaining persistence within complex data structures and objects is far from straightforward. In Python, you can use the built-in pickle library to handle this process. Pickle can serialize a Python object into a flat byte stream (pickling) as well as transform a byte stream back into a Python object (unpickling).

Many businesses use virtual private networks (VPNs) to provide secure remote access to their systems, but this has increasingly become a liability as more people switch to remote work. The greater demands placed on VPNs to offer safe access can expose organizations and employees to security vulnerabilities. In order to better protect their data and systems, organizations may need to seek alternatives to VPNs.

Michael Fey, VP of Engineering at 1Password, recently interviewed Jeremiah Peschka, staff software developer at Stack Overflow, on our Random But Memorable podcast.

The overnight move to remote and hybrid work models instantly created a more complex infrastructure for many organizations as they shifted their workers from corporate offices to their homes. The threat surface expanded exponentially as devices moved off-prem and into potentially unsecured environments and grew again as workers added their own devices to the mix.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA) has been quite busy this year. It recently issued a “Shields Up” advisory, highlighting that “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine could impact organizations both within and beyond the region,” including the threat of malicious activity against U.S. interests and companies.