One of the most important steps of securing your code base, your software, and your applications, is to update the dependencies they rely on. In principle, maintaining software health with updates demands that you use recent versions of any software and dependencies. Recent updates are less likely to be exploited and attacked via publicly known vulnerabilities than older versions, because with the latter, malicious actors have had more time to hunt for weaknesses.

This is the final of a six-part blog series that highlights findings from a new Mend white paper, Five Principles of Modern Application Security Programs. When thinking of adjectives to describe cyberattackers, it’s doubtful that many people would choose to call them innovative – a term we’re more likely to ascribe to things we enjoy. But the reality is that adversaries are innovative, constantly finding new ways to launch attacks that result in greater rewards for less effort.

First started as an open-source project in 2018, Mend Renovate automates open source dependency updates in software projects. Renovate has enabled a diverse user base across github.com and gitlab.com, reducing risk by mitigating security vulnerabilities and saving developers’ time. Renovate is now endorsed by OpenSSF and Google as the industry standard tool for dependency updates.

Modern organizations are adopting a cloud-native approach to their application development. While this approach provides many benefits, it also makes organizations face several challenges, including the challenge of securing the application with a completely different approach. In this blog, we will discuss how software changes and how organizations should think about securing it.

‘Tis the season for a busy weekend of software supply chain attacks. Over the past three days, the Mend research team identified two separate attacks that published malicious packages to npm. Mend Supply Chain Defender quickly identified the malicious code; the owners were notified, and the packages were removed. That does not fully remove the risk, however. The first package has 9.5 million downloads, while account CI keys were compromised in the second, which can cause significant damage.

Announced today at AWS re:Invent, Amazon CodeCatalyst brings together everything software development teams need to plan, code, build, test and deploy applications on AWS into a streamlined, integrated experience.

Testing practices have been shifting left in the software development process due to the growing challenge of developing and delivering high-quality, secure software at today’s competitive pace. Agile methodologies and the DevOps approach were created to address these needs. In this post, we’ll map out the basics of shift-left practices in the DevOps pipeline and discuss how to shift left your open source security and compliance testing. Contents hide 1 What does shift left mean?

The ongoing growth in the adoption of cloud services poses escalating opportunities and risks in equal measure. The increased capacity and scalability of cloud environment lends itself to an accelerated pace and higher volume of software and application development than ever before. This trend brings into play a huge increase in the number of software components and dependencies that developers use in their code bases.

We’re proud to announce that Bitbucket Cloud users can now unlock the full power of Mend for automatic detection and remediation of open source risk. With the release of our new Bitbucket Cloud integration in the Atlassian Marketplace, Mend now makes it possible for developers to find and eliminate vulnerabilities, all while staying in their Bitbucket Cloud repositories.

This is the fifth of a six-part blog series that highlights findings from a new Mend white paper, Five Principles of Modern Application Security Programs. Be sure to look out for our upcoming blogs on each of the five principles. While IT and security professionals all generally agree that cyberattacks are on the rise, there remains a great deal of disparity in how they choose to prepare for those attacks.