The software supply chain has become a prime target for cyberattacks, with incidents like SolarWinds and Log4j demonstrating the critical vulnerabilities inherent in today’s development ecosystems. The growing reliance on open source software (OSS) amplifies this risk, with recent studies showing that up to 90% of modern applications rely on open source components.
This article explores how organizations can mitigate software supply chain risks while continuing to leverage the innovation and flexibility of OSS.
Why Software Supply Chains Are at Risk
At its core, the supply chain relies on a complex web of contributors, libraries, and dependencies—each presenting a potential attack vector. Attackers exploit this complexity by injecting malicious code into trusted packages or targeting the infrastructure itself.
Key risks include:
- Dependency Hell: Updating software is often so complex and fraught with technical risks that many developers avoid the process altogether, leaving them reliant on outdated, and therefore inherently more vulnerable, components.
- Trust Assumptions: Blind reliance on open source maintainers for security and maintenance.
- Insufficient Automation: Manual processes leave gaps for unverified components to enter.
Lessons from Major Attacks
- Log4j: An ubiquitous logging library that was included as a deep transitive dependency exploited through a single vulnerability (Log4Shell). The ripple effect impacted organizations worldwide, from small startups to critical infrastructure.
- Typosquatting Attacks: Adversaries exploit minor typos in package names, such as react-dom vs. react_d0m, to introduce malicious code into projects.
Both highlight the need for proactive software supply chain security measures, including dependency tracking, automated vulnerability scanning, binary reproducibility, and fast and reliable remediation & deployment.
How to Defend Against Software Supply Chain Threats
- Prioritize Transparency: Integrate security into the development pipeline, from CI/CD to runtime monitoring. Tools like SBOMs (Software Bill of Materials) provide crucial visibility into what’s in your codebase.
- Adopt Trusted Platforms:Platforms that discover and monitor open source usage, centralize dependency management, automate updates, and enforce security policies are essential. These reduce the manual overhead of tracking OSS usage while minimizing exposure to vulnerabilities.
Security can’t be an afterthought. Organizations must view security as an enabler of innovation rather than a barrier. By addressing risks early, teams can focus on building quality software rather than responding to crises.
The Importance of Discoverability and Observability
A critical element of securing software supply chains is ensuring comprehensive discoverability and observability. Without clear visibility into the components and dependencies your software relies on, vulnerabilities remain hidden, making them easier for attackers to exploit.
Discoverability: The First Line of Defense
Knowing what’s in your codebase is the foundation of software supply chain security. Tools that generate accurate SBOMs can help developers identify every dependency, transitive or direct, used in their applications. This proactive approach reduces the risk of unpatched vulnerabilities or outdated components slipping through the cracks.
Example Use Case:
A development team using dozens of open source libraries can automatically map all dependencies and identify outdated or vulnerable versions. This prevents reliance on unmaintained software and highlights potential risks early in the development lifecycle.
Observability: Continuous Monitoring for Threats
Observability extends beyond initial discovery by offering ongoing insight into how components behave in production. This includes monitoring data flow, runtime behavior, and identifying anomalies that could signal a compromise. Integrating observability tools ensures that organizations can detect and respond to threats in real time.
Best Practices for Observability:
- Employ container orchestration platforms with integrated security monitoring, such as Kubernetes with policy enforcement plugins.
- Enable logging and tracing to analyze component behavior and pinpoint vulnerabilities.
By pairing discoverability with observability, organizations can ensure both visibility into their supply chain and the ability to respond dynamically to emerging threats.
You’re Not Secure Until You’ve Remediated and Deployed
Discovering and observing the open source in your ecosystem, while critical and informative, is not enough to keep you secure. While many tools provide insight and alerts about suspected vulnerabilities, they stop at actually helping you prioritize, remediate, and roll out the fixes. Until that action is complete, your systems remain vulnerable to bad actors. For many organizations, this part of the process is highly manual, fragmented across teams, and supported by tools that are cobbled together, which creates an operational burden that detracts from the primary mission of development and DevOps teams - delivering innovation that drives revenue to your business.
New tools are emerging that help DevSecOps teams with the last mile on remediating vulnerabilities in their applications, unlocking developers’ time from fixing issues and improving the application’s - and business’s - overall security posture.
From Chaos to Confidence: Securing Open Source Supply Chains
The rise of software supply chain attacks underscores the urgency of adopting robust security practices. Developers, organizations, and the open source community must collaborate to ensure trust and transparency remain cornerstones of the ecosystem.
Securing open source is not an option—it’s a necessity for the digital economy. Learn more by starting an Enterprise Trial on the ActiveState Platform.
About Author: Pete Garcin is the Senior Director of Product at ActiveState, where he drives innovative solutions to address the complexities of open source software management. With over 15 years of experience in software development and product strategy, Pete is passionate about enabling developers to build securely without compromise.
Pete Garcin — Senior Director of Product at ActiveState https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjH1C8C3ncEaDMDptSbVYwmyrvSR3JG0bjLR6ZPnCpodrKX-ROREqbkgds-pxEhV8eTPIUuS8NzUlIfv132H5q-ppOibexjULAze-A0UEWkMy6-5EbQGrhxICDkB186AKSKCVPNkBV3lQXKN82iibhkAngIYcSjaqp1O6XF-dKMoPWh94Qh16GiBlzFzbc/s1600/pete.png
