When it comes to your software supply chain, you are only as strong as your weakest link. You need your supply chain. However, that interconnectedness makes your digital supply chain a prime target for cybercriminals. How can enterprises protect their supply chain from cyberattacks that compromise their code, applications, and data? Software supply chain security is crucial to securing your organization.
How Does Flare’s Solution Contribute to Software Supply Chain Security?
How does Flare’s platform meet software supply chain security needs?
The trouble with suppliers and other third parties is that you have very little control over their cybersecurity controls. Other than questionnaires or contractual requirements, you can’t make a vendor adopt your preferred security controls.
Rather than focusing on the reaction to threats, with Threat Exposure Management (CTEM), Flare has a proactive approach to threat identification and management across your extended enterprise. Flare continuously monitors and analyzes your digital assets across your entire attack surface so you can identify and mitigate suppliers’ vulnerabilities before attackers find them.
How does Flare’s software mitigate supply-side threats?
Software supply chain security is critical to your data’s safety. Flare’s TEM solution continuously monitors the clear & dark web and prominent threat actor communities to identify vulnerabilities. If data is stolen or leaked, Flare will identify it as soon as it’s mentioned online. If your data has been compromised, Flare will notify you.
What are the key benefits of Flare’s software supply chain security solution?
- Visibility into vulnerabilities: Flare’s data leak monitoring solution scans the web and Telegram channels to find leaks before lost data can be exploited.
- A window into GitHub leaks: GitHub repositories often store sensitive information in plaintext, making them attractive targets for cybercriminals. However, manually monitoring public repositories and GitHub secrets is a time-consuming, manual process that can lead to errors and data breaches.
- Continuous monitoring of digital assets: Automated cybersecurity risk management software gives you 24/7 coverage of your key suppliers’ assets, so you will know as soon as your information is leaked or stolen.
- A proactive security stance: By actively seeking out leaks and stolen data, you can catch breaches and accidental data exposures early.
Software Supply Chain Security: An Overview
What is the software supply chain?
The software supply chain refers to the entire suite of processes, tools, components, and participants involved in the development, deployment, and maintenance of software. It encompasses everything that touches your code, from the initial code creation to the final distribution and updates of software products.
Just like a traditional supply chain in manufacturing, the software supply chain includes various stages and elements that must be carefully managed to ensure the final product is secure, reliable, and functional.
What is software supply chain security?
Software supply chain security is the practice of securing your digital supply chain from attack. This includes securing all the components, tools, processes, and personnel involved in creating, distributing, and maintaining software. The software supply chain is increasingly targeted by attackers because while it might be difficult to breach an application as a whole, by compromising a single component, the attacker can create widespread vulnerabilities.
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What are the components of software supply chain security?
Given the importance of the software supply chain, ensuring the security of the software supply chain should be a major focus for security teams and developers, including:
- Vetting third-party components: Ensuring that any external code or libraries used in the software are secure and free from vulnerabilities.
- Securing development environments: Protecting the tools and systems used to develop software from being compromised.
- Monitoring and responding to threats: Continuously monitoring the software supply chain for potential threats and having procedures in place to respond quickly if a security issue is detected.
Why is Software Supply Chain Security Particularly Relevant Now?
Why do you need software supply chain security in today’s cybersecurity landscape?
Very few software applications are written from scratch. Most software is a combination of different software artifacts, often containing open source code. Open source code and other code from third parties, however, can be subject to vulnerabilities. Criminals are aware of this. They attempt to insert or exploit vulnerabilities in often-reused code. This allows them to sit back and wait until the code is used in an application. Then a bad actor can use that vulnerability to steal data, enter a system, or control a network.
What role does Github play in supply chain security?
GitHub allows developers to create, store, and collaborate on their code, but it’s also easy to accidentally leak sensitive information on the platform. Bad actors may also attempt to distribute malicious code using the platform. For this reason, GitHub leak monitoring/source code leak monitoring is an essential part of an organization’s security controls.
Is GitHub safe and secure?
GitHub can be safe and secure, but it’s also been the source of many leaks, both accidental and malicious. With more than 100 million repositories and thousands of new commits every minute, there’s an increased risk of human error. It’s possible to accidentally commit a GitHub secret that is then pushed to a public repository.
Reports have found that developers hardcode secrets into GitHub repositories fairly regularly— this means the secrets are encoded as plaintext in the source code, which is a security risk. It’s also possible for secrets to be pushed to publicly accessible repositories rather than to the private repositories they are supposed to go to.
Learn more about how Flare enables a customer to simplify GitHub leak monitoring across distributed teams.
Software Supply Chain Security and Flare
The Flare Threat Exposure Management (TEM) solution empowers organizations to proactively detect, prioritize, and mitigate the types of exposures commonly exploited by threat actors. Our platform automatically scans the clear & dark web and prominent threat actor communities 24/7 to discover unknown events, prioritize risks, and deliver actionable intelligence you can use instantly to improve security.
Flare integrates into your security program in 30 minutes and often replaces several SaaS and open source tools. Learn more by signing up for our free trial.
