It feels like every week a new software library or vendor is compromised. How do you keep up with these Cybersecurity Trends without spending all day reading CVE reports? Is there a better way to vet our vendors beyond just sending them a security questionnaire?
3 answers
Questionnaires are honestly becoming useless because everyone just "checks the boxes." We’ve started asking for SOC 2 Type II reports and looking at their actual uptime and incident history. For our software stack, we use an SBOM (Software Bill of Materials) tool that automatically alerts us if one of our vendors is using a library with a known vulnerability. It automates the "reading CVE reports" part of the job. It’s impossible to be 100% secure, but knowing exactly what is inside the software you're running is the first step toward managing that risk effectively.
Which SBOM tools are you using that don't cost an arm and a leg for a smaller dev team?
We prioritize vendors who offer "Security by Design" and are transparent about their patch cycles. Transparency is worth more than a 20-page questionnaire.
Absolutely. A vendor that admits to a flaw and patches it quickly is much more trustworthy than one that claims to be "impenetrable" but hides their logs.
There are some great open-source options like CycloneDX. It takes a bit of setup in your CI/CD pipeline, but once it's running, it gives you a very clear map of your dependencies without the enterprise price tag.