This week, Australian authorities recovered a tiny capsule, just 6mm x 8mm (0.24 x 0.31 inches) along a 900km section of Australia’s longest highway, the Great Northern Highway. The pea-sized capsule was a radiation gauge containing caesium-137, a radioactive material with a half-life of 30.05 years, that is used to measure the density and flow of materials in the mining, and oil and gas industries.
There are already so many words and concepts in information security: why do we need another one? And indeed ‘attestation’ is already used in several industry contexts with many subtly different meanings: what do we gain by overloading it?
Regulatory demands now make an SBOM an essential in any organization. The Biden Administration released a memo in September 2022 that directs federal agencies to adopt guidelines from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) for securing software used by the federal government and attest to its security.
Attacks targeting the software supply chain are on the rise. Indeed, data from the Mend Open Source Risk Report shows a steady quarterly increase in the number of malicious packages published in 2022, with a significant jump in Q3, which jumped 79 percent from Q2. The European Cybersecurity Agency (ENISA) predicts that supply chain attacks will increase fourfold by 2022.
2022 was the year of the rise of the SBOM. This time of year, we take a look back at the havoc wreaked by breaches–that occurred in 2021 and earlier. The fallout from SolarWinds and Kaseya cyberattacks continued into 2022, which poignantly illustrated how vulnerable the software supply chain is. The Log4j open-source vulnerability at the end of 2021 further illuminated the need for visibility around hard-to-find flaws.
On December 8th, Clinton Herget and Simon Maple, Field CTOs at Snyk, had the opportunity to chat with Corey Quinn, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, podcast host, curator of “Last Week in AWS”, and snarky Twitter personality. Their conversation took a lot of fun turns, from ranting about the hour-long line to get coffee at AWS re:Invent, to Corey proclaiming that “SBOMs are a fantasy” (there’s more context to that… keep reading).
Red Hat OpenShift is an enterprise Kubernetes container platform. It lets you build Docker images and use them to deploy your applications on a cloud-like environment (even if it’s not really on the cloud, rather a simulated cloud environment). Images built in OpenShift can be easily pushed into JFrog Artifactory – JFrog’s leading universal repository manager.
That’s an excerpt from the fact sheet accompanying the May 2021 Executive Order on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity (EO). It refers to one of seven ambitious measures in the EO: shoring up security of that notorious playground for hackers, the software supply chain. Knowing that organizations lack visibility into the components that comprise their connected assets, bad actors can have a field day exploiting vulnerabilities to penetrate networks and take control.
