The SolarWinds attack in late 2020 exposed the data of more than 18,000 businesses and governmental departments – many of which are gatekeepers for the country’s most vital infrastructure. While attacks against the software supply chain aren’t new, they are increasing exponentially.
The Presidential Executive Order made it clear that the status quo, where the hidden vulnerabilities in cyber supply chains left doors wide open to attackers, can no longer be allowed to persist. It correctly identified transparency as the key principle to build trust and Software Bills of Material as a critical first step of the solution. But while much of the current debate is focused on how to build SBOMs, further and deeper thinking is needed on how to share them.
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.
In May 2021, President Joe Biden signed an executive order (EO) aiming to strengthen America’s cybersecurity. One key point in the EO was the need to improve software supply chain security, and reduce the vulnerabilities that allow adversaries to launch cyberattacks against public and private organizations.
Do you want to archive old emails now? We’ve all seen the prompt and many of us choose to consign thousands of emails to an uncertain fate, protected (somewhere) in case we should ever need to cover our arses in some future argument. But this paints a very limited and negative picture of the importance and indeed relevance of archives. Today archives are associated with rearward-facing research, often seeking to uncover a truth long after alternative facts have taken hold.
The DevOps, IT security and IT governance communities will remember 2021 as the year when the Software Bill of Materials , or SBOM, graduated from a “nice to have” to a “must have.” Around for years, the SBOM has now become a critical DevSecOps piece, which everyone must thoroughly understand and incorporate into their SDLC (Software Development Lifecycle).
