It seems like every day there’s a new incident of customer data exposure. Credit card and bank account numbers; medical records; personally identifiable information (PII) such as address, phone number, or SSN— just about every aspect of social interaction has an informational counterpart, and the social access this information provides to third parties gives many people the feeling that their privacy has been severely violated when it’s exposed.
Open source is everywhere. Everyone is using it. Open source code is found in almost every proprietary software offering on the market and is estimated to make up on average 60%-80% of all software codebases in 2020. Why the proliferation? Open source libraries help developers write code faster to meet the increasingly shorter release cycles under DevOps pipelines. Instead of writing new code, developers leverage existing open source libraries to quickly gain needed functionality.
Most modern codebases are dependent on open source libraries. In fact, a recent research report sponsored by Veracode and conducted by Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) found that more than 96 percent of organizations use open source libraries in their codebase. But – shockingly – less than half of these organizations have invested in specific security controls to scan for open source vulnerabilities.
The global pandemic caused an abrupt shift to remote work among enterprise knowledge workers, which in turn resulted in an increase in risky behavior. Attackers immediately tried to capitalize on the pandemic, with COVID-19-themed phishing emails, scams, and Trojans. At the same time, techniques used in more sophisticated cyberattacks continued to evolve.
If you bring up the topic of “shadow IT” to your head of IT, you will likely get a lecture about how employees need to follow protocol when using cloud cloud services so they don’t put the organization at risk. They’re not wrong. Without proper protection, unsanctioned tools can have significant consequences and unintentionally introduce security gaps.
