Threat actors operate by an ironclad rule: If it’s important to businesses, it’s important to them. And they certainly understand the crucial business role of applications. Applications are now the number one attack vector, while software supply chain attacks increased 650 percent in a year. Clearly, if you don’t already have a modern application security program, you need to build one. But how do you make sure that your program will be effective?

Effectively managing the many open source licenses used in enterprise software is a complex task that requires a thorough evaluation of key features in software license management tools. After that, you need to implement the technology using several best practices. In this blog post, let’s take a brief look at both.

Threat actors today are increasingly targeting the application layer, driving significant challenges for companies using traditional application security strategies. To defend themselves against the rapidly evolving threat landscape, organizations need to build a modern AppSec strategy that addresses these fast-changing conditions. But how?

The containerization of software and applications continues to escalate, and although alternatives have emerged to challenge Docker, it continues to enjoy major adoption by developers for building and sharing software and apps. In 2022, Docker estimated that 44% of developers are using some form of continuous integration and development with Docker containers.

More and more companies are using more and more open source. The stats I’ve seen say seventy to seventy-five percent of all applications use open source or have some type of open source associated with them. I think that number is actually higher. Of all the companies that I’ve worked for, just about every single application has some type of open source associated with it.

Application security is particularly important in the banking and financial technology sector, where a single breach can put large portions of sensitive information at risk. How to manage that risk is a complex process that affects how teams secure applications across their software supply chain.

According to Forrester Research, applications are the top cause of external breaches because cybercriminals consider them to be one of the easiest entry points to attack organizations’ code bases. As supply chain attacks increase, it has become increasingly important for organizations to implement and maintain a continuous application security program and make it a priority.

It would be big news, to say the least, if a large quantity of Google source code found its way into the public domain. Now imagine if the leak also included source code from Amazon and Uber. That’s the scale of the data leak that hit Russian tech giant Yandex. The risk here is that malicious actors could analyze the leaked code and discover exploitable security gaps.