*April 1 update. it was confirmed that Fedora 40 is not affected by the backdoor. However, users should still downgrade to a 5.4 build to be safe. On March 29th, 2024, a critical CVE was issued for the XZ-Utils library. This vulnerability allows an attacker to run arbitrary code remotely on affected systems. Due to its immediate impact and wide scope, the vulnerability has scored 10 for both CVSS 3.1 and CVSS 4, which is the highest score available.

Early on March 28, 2024, the Mend.io research team detected more than 100 malicious packages targeting the most popular machine learning (ML) libraries from the PyPi registry. Among those libraries are Pytorch, Matplotlib, and Selenium.

Containers have taken over the world of software development. According to Gartner analysts, “90% of global organizations will be running containerized applications in production by 2026,” up from 40% in 2021. Containerized applications provide enterprises with an agile, modern approach in the age of cloud computing; safeguarding these technologies from existing and future threats requires equally modern methods.

While cloud-native development brilliantly solves problems related to scalability and effective resource use, a more complex architecture and new security challenges come along for the ride as well. The added layer of abstraction of container architecture can make tracking down vulnerabilities and poorly stored secrets, assessing true risk, and enforcing policies difficult for security teams using only traditional AppSec tools.

Headed by NIST, an American government institution, the National Vulnerability Database (NVD) contains vulnerability data that’s been key to protecting organizations both within and without the US borders for more than 20 years. Many security policies from both commercial and government organizations require that vendors take care of vulnerabilities of a particular severity as given by the NVD within a certain number of days.

Securing AI is a top cybersecurity priority and concern for governments and businesses alike. Developers have easy access to pre-trained AI models through platforms like Hugging Face and to AI-generated functions and programs through large language models (LLMs) like GitHub Co-Pilot. This access has spurred developers to create innovative software at an enormously fast pace.