As a former systems and network administrator, I understand the demands that are placed on today’s IT professionals. It’s true that skills gap continues to hamper IT and security personnel, for example. In early 2020, Tripwire revealed the results of a survey in which 83% of security professionals noted that they felt more overworked going into that year than they did at the start of 2019.
Guessing how many marbles are in a jar is either a fun carnival game (pick the average based on the wisdom of the crowd) or a math problem involving orb volume, cylinder volume and the estimated space between marbles. You can also just count the marbles. Unfortunately, when it comes to identifying the number of devices connected to your network, none of these approaches works – although quasi-manual counting remains all too common.
We’ve seen a massive increase in the number of open source packages created and used in the wild during the past few years. These days every ecosystem has its package manager, and almost every package manager has its hidden gems and configurations. That said, as developers continuously install an ever-expanding number of packages, attackers gain interest in the packages’ attack surfaces. Then, the journey to craft the perfectly hidden malicious package begins.
