As supply chain attacks continue to dominate headlines, software development teams are beginning to realize that package management can’t be taken lightly — the threats hidden under the hood are real. In this installment of The Source, we want to talk about the practices and tools that developers need to adopt in order to protect against supply chain attacks.

President Biden’s cybersecurity executive order from last month should cause little surprise for anyone following news headlines over the past year. The order is the U.S. Federal Government’s important response to a long list of incidents, starting with the SolarWinds attack and ending with a recent ransomware attack against Colonial Pipeline —- the largest known attack against a US energy firm.

Industries of all kinds make use of supply chain management software to automate their business processes. A supply-chain attack is an incident in which one or more people with malicious intent insert themselves into the flow of production, distribution, and/or system management. Supply Chain Attacks usually target manufacturers that create software or services for other companies who use those products while serving their end customers.

We have been witnessing an ever growing amount of supply chain security incidents in the wild. Everything from open source package managers security flaws being exploited to continuous integration systems being compromised to software artifacts being backdoored. And now, those incidents are starting to extend to the place where developers spend most of their time: their integrated development environment, and specifically the Visual Studio Code IDE.

“The United States faces persistent and increasingly sophisticated malicious cyber campaigns that threaten the public sector, the private sector, and ultimately the American people’s security and privacy. The Federal Government must improve its efforts to identify, deter, protect against, detect, and respond to these actions and actors.”

Open source helps developers build faster. But who’s making sure these open source dependencies (sometimes years out of development) stay secure? In a recent npm security research activity, Snyk uncovered a total of 8 npm packages which matched a specific malicious code vector of attack. This specific attack vector of the malicious packages included packages which had pre/post install scripts, which allowed them to run arbitrary commands when installed.

Another day, another supply chain attack. No sooner did we recover from the SolarWinds breach, than we found ourselves reeling from a new ClickStudio attack. That’s why we’ve decided to launch this new series, fondly named The Source, to provide you with the latest news and updates on supply chain security. On this installment of ‘The Source’, get to know the red hot supply chain attack methods du jour.

The Biden administration said it’s drafting an executive order to help the United States government better defend itself against digital supply chain attacks.

Where were you when you first heard about the SolarWinds breach? It’s not unusual for information security professionals to learn about a breach. Keeping track of the news is part of the job. The SolarWinds attack, however, was different for two primary reasons. First, it reached the level of mainstream news. The majority of breaches stay mostly in the industry press.