For consecutive years, applications have remained the top attack vector for black hats, with supply chain attacks not far behind. At the same time, market research indicates that enterprise security managers and software developers continue to complain that their application security tools are cumbersome. When asked, many developers admit that they don’t run security tests as often as they should, and they push code to production even when they know it has security flaws.

How important is a company name, really? Turns out that it is pretty important, especially if the name you currently have does not represent what the company has become, or where it is going. Our name is what defines the vision, spirit, and ethos of who we are and what we are trying to accomplish—the strategy, technology, and culture all rolled into one. It needs to be crisp, memorable, and legally acquirable. Guess what? It is harder than it looks…

In 2011, my co-founders Azi Cohen, Ron Rymon, and I founded WhiteSource with a mission to automate all tasks surrounding the use and security of open source software. We were pioneering the software composition analysis (SCA) market before it had a name. Over the years, we’ve evolved to offer more value to our customers beyond our founding purpose.

To stay ahead of malicious attacks, developers and security teams must have a way to identify, prioritize, fix, and monitor vulnerabilities, a process known as vulnerability remediation. When it comes to detection, organizations can use a variety of application security testing (AST) tools to identify vulnerabilities in software applications and other systems.

To stay ahead of malicious attacks, developers and security teams must have a way to identify, prioritize, fix, and monitor vulnerabilities, a process known as vulnerability remediation. When it comes to detection, organizations can use a variety of application security testing (AST) tools to identify vulnerabilities in software applications and other systems.

It’s been a bad month for RubyGems vulnerabilities. Critical CVE-2022-29176 was issued May 8, 2022, and another critical CVE-2022-29218 was discovered less than a week later, on May 11. This new vulnerability would allow for a takeover of new versions of some platform-specific gems under certain circumstances.

All developers are prone to mistakes that leave them open to typosquatting attacks. Tiredness, dirty keyboard, or software issues may lead to typing some letters twice. Everyone would like to see a red screen and alarm coming out of the computer in such a case, but sadly, it doesn’t always work that way with most supply chain attacks.

On May 6, 2022, a critical CVE was published for RubyGems, the primary packages source for the Ruby ecosystem. This vulnerability created a window of opportunity for malicious actors to take over gems that met the following criteria: Because RubyGems provides data dumps that include a lot of information, it is unfortunately relatively simple to create an automated mining process for these criteria.

NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) is a federal agency under the responsibility of the US Department of Commerce. Established in 1901 to promote innovation and industrial competitiveness in the US, NIST helps organizations advance measurement science, technology, and standards to improve the quality of life for citizens and enhance economic security.

What’s your role in the vulnerability management process?

On April 28 and April 30, respectively, WhiteSource Diffend identified, blocked, and reported two packages we deemed were malicious versions of original Amazon Web Services (AWS) packages. Whitesource security experts have reached out to contacts at Amazon to notify them of our findings. This discovery may point to a new takeover method that targets packages of well-known origins, in this case, AWS.