A craftsman requires the appropriate skills and tools to work in tandem in order to create a masterpiece. While tools are an important enabler in the process of creating the best piece of work possible, the process also requires relevant experience and expertise on the part of the craftsman. Much like craftsman’s toolbox, a pen tester’s toolbox has wide variety of pen tester tools to work with based on the business objective.

Each year, our "Open Source Security and Risk Analysis” (OSSRA) report highlights the fact that open source software (OSS) plays a critical and substantial role in modern application development, and it is therefore foundational to the software supply chain. The prevalence of OSS within commercial applications makes it difficult to track, and that makes it difficult to manage the risk that it may introduce.

Enterprise organizations face big challenges in managing software application risk at scale. With hundreds of developers working on thousands of applications across numerous business units, the complexity of ensuring security throughout the software development life cycle (SDLC) is staggering.

A week ago, on March 29th, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) warned that two versions of xz Utils, were found to have been compromised. The xz Utils code had been tampered with to include a malicious “backdoor” that would ultimately give attackers the same level of control over affected systems as authorized administrators.

Major shifts in application development are creating new and significant security risks. Continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines and technology advances like automation and AI mean the development process is now so complicated and fast-moving that corporations, DevOps directors, and security groups struggle to understand and manage it, let alone defend it from assaults.

If you’re a software developer, you’re probably using open source components and libraries to build software. You know those components are governed by different open source licenses, but do you know all the license details? In particular, do you know the sometimes-convoluted licensing conditions that could pose compliance challenges for your organization?

In the late 1980s, a buffer overflow in UNIX’s fingerd program allowed Robert T. Morris to create a worm which infected 10% of the Internet—in two days. This event launched cybersecurity to the forefront of computer science headlines for one of the first times in history. Nearly three decades later in 2014, a buffer overflow vulnerability in the OpenSSL cryptography library was disclosed to the public.

The newly released update in early 2024 of the NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) from 1.1 to 2.0 represents a significant step forward in cybersecurity management and reflects the latest advancements in technology and threat mitigation.

Vulnerability remediation is the process of identifying weaknesses and design flaws in your applications, prioritizing findings based off of the level of risk they pose, and then performing appropriate actions to resolve them. Options for vulnerability remediation include remediating (fixing) an issue, ignoring it (when it is not risky enough to merit the resources needed to fix it), or applying compensating controls to help counteract the risk posed by the vulnerability.