As Software Bill of Materials (SBOMs), become increasingly necessary and in some cases, required by private companies and governments globally, they are meant to provide transparency and help organizations understand what is in their software. But if SBOMs are so helpful, how come nobody knows what to do with them?

It should be no surprise that the world runs on open source software. According to the latest Forrester Wave Software Composition Analysis Q4 2024 report an “astonishing 77% of codebases are comprised of open-source software.” Since a “considerable amount of an application’s risk is due to third-party sources,” software composition analysis (SCA) tools remain the lifeblood for securing modern applications and bringing greater transparency to the software supply chain.

The increasing reliance on open-source software coupled with the accelerated pace of software development has created a growing need for support of deprecated packages. The significant majority of open-source software packages are not actively maintained, meaning vulnerabilities are not patched, thereby leaving systems open to attack. Malicious actors often target deprecated open-source packages for this very reason.

AI is growing in power and scope and many organizations have moved on from “simply” training models. In this blog, we will cover a common system of LLM use called Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). RAG adds some extra steps to typical use of a large language model (LLM) so that instead of working off just the prompt and its training data, the LLM has additional, usually more up-to-date, data “fresh in mind”.

As the vast majority of modern applications rely heavily on open-source software, dealing with updates for dependencies can become a major hassle for both developers and cybersecurity professionals. Every developer knows the pain of an update breaking their application. Manually determining which dependencies to run can become a massive time-suck, which is why many developers fall behind on updates, leaving applications open to vulnerabilities.

Happy October! The leaves are changing and everyone is starting to get ready for the upcoming holidays, but let’s not forget one of the most important holidays of the year—Cybersecurity Awareness Month! Though our audience is almost entirely cybersecurity experts, we wanted to put something together to help the less technical people in our lives learn more about AI and cybersecurity, because Cybersecurity Month is for everyone.