Healthy developer-team culture and adherence to devsecops best practices to protect against supply chain attacks are surprisingly commonplace in today’s security environment, according to a report from Google Cloud's DORA research program. For enterprise security professionals alarmed about the rising number of supply chain attacks, a report released this week by Google Cloud’s DORA (devops reseach and assessment) program has good news: Devsecops best practices are becoming more and more common.The recent prevalence of supply chain attacks—most notably the SolarWinds attack, which affected numerous large companies in 2021—has brought the topic into prominence. The report, though, found that many supply chain security practices recommended by the major frameworks are already in place among software developers, based on an ongoing “snowball” survey of 33,000 such developers over the past eight years.There are two major frameworks for addressing software supply chain development issues, which are those that stem from the complex nature of modern software development—many projects include open source components, licensed libraries, and contributions from numerous developers and various third parties.Two major security frameworks aim at supply chain attacksOne major security framework is Supply-chain Levels for Software Artifacts, a Google-backed standard, and the other is the NIST’s Secure Software Development Framework. Both enumerate a number of best practices for software development, including two-person review of software changes, protected source code platforms, and dependency tracking. “The interesting thing is that a lot of these practices, according to the survey, are actually relatively established,” said John Speed Meyers, a security data scientist at supply-chain security firm Chainguard and one of the report’s contributing writers. “A lot of the practices in there, 50% of the respondents said that they were established.”The most common of those practices, according to Google user experience researcher Todd Kulesza—another author of the report—is CI/CD (continuous integration/continuous development), which is a method of rapidly delivering applications and updates by leveraging automation at different stages of development. “It’s one of the key enablers for supply chain security,” he said. “It’s a backstop – [developers] know that the same vulnerability scanners, et centera, are all going to be run against all their code.”Moreover, the report found that a healthier culture in software development teams was a predictor of fewer security incidents and better software delivery. Higher-trust cultures—where developers felt comfortable reporting problems and confident that their reports would bring action—were much more likely to produce more secure software and retain good developers.“Sometimes, cultural arguments can feel really fluffy,” said Speed Meyers. “What is nice about some of these … culture ideas is that they actually lead to concrete standards and practices.”Kulesza echoed that emphasis on high-trust, collaborative culture in software working groups, which the report refers to as “generative” culture, as opposed to rules-based “bureaucratic” or power-focused cultures. He said that practices like after-action reports for development incidents and preset standards for work led to better outcomes across the board.“One way to think about this is that if there is a security vulnerability that an engineer realizes has made it into production, you don’t want to be in an organization where that engineer worries about bringing that problem to light,” he said. Related content brandpost How an integrated platform approach improves OT security By Richard Springer Sep 26, 2023 5 mins Security news Teachers urged to enter schoolgirls into UK’s flagship cybersecurity contest CyberFirst Girls aims to introduce girls to cybersecurity, increase diversity, and address the much-maligned skills shortage in the sector. By Michael Hill Sep 26, 2023 4 mins Back to School Education Industry IT Training news CREST, IASME to deliver UK NCSC’s Cyber Incident Exercising scheme CIE scheme aims to help organisations find quality service providers that can advise and support them in practising cyber incident response plans. By Michael Hill Sep 26, 2023 3 mins IT Governance Frameworks Incident Response Data and Information Security news Baffle releases encryption solution to secure data for generative AI Solution uses the advanced encryption standard algorithm to encrypt sensitive data throughout the generative AI pipeline. By Michael Hill Sep 26, 2023 3 mins Encryption Generative AI Data and Information Security Podcasts Videos Resources Events SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER From our editors straight to your inbox Get started by entering your email address below. Please enter a valid email address Subscribe