Application Security

Want To Prevent Another SolarWinds? Start With Developers

It already seems like a lifetime ago that the hack of the Orion network management software by SolarWinds consumed the attention of the media, lawmakers and the for-profit information security industry. In reality, it was barely six months ago that the intrusion first came to light.

In the space of a few months, however, there have already been successive, disruptive events of at least the same seriousness. Among them: the attacks on vulnerabilities in Microsoft’s Exchange Server and – in the last week – the ransomware attack that brought down the Colonial Pipeline in the Eastern United States.

Lessons Still Being Learned

The “party” may have moved on from SolarWinds, the impact and import of the SolarWinds Orion hack are still being worked out. What were the “lessons” from SolarWinds? Beyond the 200 + organizations that were impacted by the supply chain compromise, how can private and public sector firms learn from it and become more resilient and less susceptible to the kind of attacks that hit the likes of FireEye, Qualys, Equifax and more?

The Securing the Software Supply Chain Roundtable took place May 6th and was sponsored by ForAllSecure.

To help answer those questions, the security firm ForAllSecure assembled* an all-star roundtable to tackle the question not so much of “what happened” with SolarWinds, but “how to prevent it from happening again.” I had the pleasure of moderating that discussion and I’m excited to share the video of our talk below.

Our panel included some of the sharpest minds in information security. David Brumley, a star security researcher and the CEO of ForAllSecure was joined by Chenxi Wang, a Managing General Partner at Rain Capital. We also welcomed infosec legend and Metasploit creator H.D. Moore, now the CEO of Rumble, Inc. and Vincent Liu, the CEO of the firm Bishop Fox.

I’ve included a link to our discussion below. I urge you to check it out – there are a lot of valuable insights and take aways from our panelists. In the meantime, here are a couple of my high-level take aways:

Supply Chain’s Fuzzy Borders

One of the biggest questions we wrestled with as a panel was how to define “supply chain risk” and “supply chain hacks.” It’s a harder question than you might think. Our panelists were in agreement that there was a lot of confusion in the popular and technology media about what is- and isn’t supply chain risk. Our panelists weren’t even in agreement on whether SolarWinds, itself, constituted a supply chain hack, given that the company wasn’t a supply chain partner to the victims of the attack, so much as a service provider. Regardless, there was broad agreement that the risk is real and pronounced.

Episode 208: Getting Serious about Hardware Supply Chains with Goldman Sachs’ Michael Mattioli

“We rely on third party software and services a lot more – APIs and everything,” said Chenxi Wang. “With that, the risk from software supply chain is really more pronounced.”

“What your definition of supply chain risk depends on where you sit,” said Vincent Liu. That starts with third party or open source libraries. “If you’re a software developer your supply chain looks very different from an end user who does no software development but needs to ensure that the software you bring into an organization is secure.”

At the end of the day: getting the exact definition of “supply chain risk” is less important than understanding what the term means for your organization and – of course – making sure you’re accounting for that risk in your security planning and investment.

Third Party Code: Buggy, or Bugged?

Another big question our panel considered was who was behind supply chain attacks and who the targets were. Vincent Liu of Bishop Fox. Supply chain insecurities are deliberately introduced into software development. A different approach needs to be taken when securing against that versus traditional secure software development tools, which are about identifying flaws in the (legitimate) software development process.

Firms are embracing Open Source. Securing it? Not so much.

The impact of a flawed open source component and a compromised one matters, even if the impact is the same. The distinction between inadvertent vulnerabilities and attacks matters, said Brumley. “You really have to tease out the question of a vulnerability and whether inserted by the attacker or just latent there,” he said. The media is more interested in the concept of a malicious actor working behind the scenes to undermine software, whereas shoddy software may be less dramatic. But both need to be addressed, he said.

Developers in the Crosshairs

Another big takeaway concerns the need for more attention within organizations to an overlooked target in supply chain attacks: the developer. “It used to be that attacks were focused on company repositories and company source code. Now they’re very focused on developer machines instead,” said Moore of Rumble. “There are a lot more phishing attacks on developers, a lot of folks scraping individual developer accounts on GitHub looking for secrets. So it’s really shifted from attacks on large corporations with centralized resources to individual developer resources.”

The days of sensitive information like credentials and API keys hiding in plain site are over. “Especially for developers, your mean time to compromise now is so fast,” said Moore.

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Unfortunately, too few organizations are investing to solve that very real problem. Too many firms are continuing to direct the lion’s share of their security investment into legacy tools, technologies and capabilities. ““Tons of tooling and money has been spent in terms of things that find vulnerabilities because they can find them,” notes Liu. “But most of them don’t matter. Really spending your time on the right things rather than just doing things because you can do them is so critically important.”

Check out our whole conversation below!

(*) Disclosure: This blog post was sponsored by ForAllSecure. For more information on how Security Ledger works with its sponsors and sponsored content on Security Ledger, check out our About Security Ledger page on sponsorships and sponsor relations.

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