Study: 82% of CIOs Say Their Software Supply Chains Are Vulnerable

June 01, 2022 at 08:00 AM EDT

Boards, CEOs demand software supply chain security improvements

Venafi®, the inventor and leading provider of machine identity management, today announced the findings of a global study of 1,000 CIOs, in which 82% say their organizations are vulnerable to cyberattacks targeting software supply chains. The shift to cloud native development, along with the increased speed in development brought about by the adoption of DevOps processes, has made the challenges connected with securing software supply chains infinitely more complex. Meanwhile, adversaries, motivated by the success of high-profile software supply chain attacks on companies like SolarWinds and Kaseya, are stepping up attacks against software build and distribution environments.

The sharp increase in the number and sophistication of these attacks over the last 12 months has brought this issue into sharp focus, gaining the attention of CEOs and Boards. As a result, CIOs are becoming increasingly concerned about the serious business disruptions, revenue loss, data theft and customer damage that can result from successful software supply chain attacks.

Key findings from the study:

87% of CIOs believe software engineers and developers compromise on security policies and controls in order to get new products and services to market faster
85% of CIOs have been specifically instructed by the board or CEO to improve the security of software build and distribution environments.
84% say the budget dedicated to the security of software development environments has increased over the past year.

“Digital transformation has made every business a software developer. And as a result, software development environments have become huge target for attackers,” said Kevin Bocek, vice president of threat intelligence and business development for Venafi. “Hackers have discovered that successful supply chain attacks, especially those that target machine identities, are extremely efficient and more profitable.”

Bocek has seen literally dozens of ways to compromise development environments in these types of attacks, including attacks that leverage open source software components like Log4j. “The reality is that developers are focused on innovation and speed rather than security,” Bocek explained. “Unfortunately, security teams rarely have the knowledge or the resources to help developers solve these problems and CIOs are just waking up to these challenges.”

More than 90% of software applications use open source components, and the dependencies and vulnerabilities associated with open source software are extremely complex. CI/CD and DevOps pipelines are typically structured to enable developers to move quickly but not necessarily more securely. In the push to innovate faster, the complexity of open source and the speed of development limit the efficacy of software supply chain security controls.

CIOs realize they need to change their approach to overcome these challenges. As a result:

68% are implementing more security controls
57% are updating their review processes
56% are expanding their use of code signing, a key security control for software supply chains
47% are looking at the provenance of their open source libraries

"CIOs realize they need to improve software supply chain security but it’s extremely difficult to determine exactly where the risks are, which improvements provide the greatest increase in security, and how these changes reduce risk over time," continued Bocek. “We can’t solve this problem using existing methodologies. Instead, we need to think differently about the identity and integrity of the code we are building and using—and we need to protect and secure it at every step of the development process at machine speed.”

To assess the security of your software supply chain and get recommendations on industry best practices visit: https://jetstack.io/software-supply-chain/

Resources:

Blog: 82% of CIOs say their software supply chains are vulnerable

Whitepaper: Software Supply Chain Attack Surfaces Expanding

About the research

Conducted by Coleman Parkes Research, Venafi’s survey evaluated the opinions of 1000 CIOs across six countries/regions: United States, United Kingdom, France, DACH (Germany, Austria, Switzerland), Benelux (Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg) and Australasia (Australia, New Zealand).

About Venafi

Venafi is the cybersecurity market leader in machine identity management. From the ground to the cloud, Venafi solutions manage and protect identities for all types of machines—from physical and IoT devices to software applications, APIs and containers. Venafi provides global visibility, lifecycle automation and actionable intelligence for all machine identity types and the security and reliability risks associated with them.

Jetstack, a Venafi company, is a cloud native products and strategic consulting company working with enterprises using Kubernetes and OpenShift.

An open source pioneer, Jetstack has achieved notable industry recognition as the creator of cert-manager, the open source industry standard for cloud native machine identity management. Jetstack’s open source products and solutions protect the application environments and platform infrastructure of global banks, multinational retailing companies and defense organizations by providing enterprise platform and security teams the power to build, scale and security their cloud infrastructure.

With more than 30 patents, Venafi delivers innovative machine identity management solutions for the world's most demanding, security-conscious organizations and government agencies, including the top five U.S. health insurers; the top five U.S. airlines; the top four credit card issuers; three out of the four top accounting and consulting firms; four of the five top U.S. retailers; and the top four banks in each of the following countries: the U.S., the U.K., Australia and South Africa.

www.venafi.com