Combatting supply chain security threats

According to Gartner, “By 2025, 45% of organizations worldwide will have experienced attacks on their software supply chains, a three-fold increase from 2021.”* Unit 42’s Cloud Threat Report also found that access to hardcoded credentials opened the door for lateral movement and continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline poisoning.

With software supply chain attacks rising rapidly, Palo Alto Networks has introduced Prisma® Cloud Supply Chain Security to provide a complete view of where potential vulnerabilities or misconfigurations exist in the software supply chain — allowing organizations to quickly trace to the source and fix them. If not quickly fixed or, better yet, avoided during coding, these security flaws could allow attackers to infiltrate systems, spread malicious payloads throughout an organization’s software and access sensitive data. 

Many current solutions only provide vulnerability and misconfiguration information at a resource layer in code or in the cloud. With Supply Chain Security, Prisma Cloud, already a leader in cloud native security and the most complete Cloud Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP), provides not only full lifecycle visibility and protection but the context of where a vulnerability fits into the layers of a cloud architecture.  

“Every day new vulnerabilities are found in open source and other software components that have previously been integrated into the organization's software code. Without the proper tools, it is very difficult for organizations to quickly spot where they have used the unpatched versions of these components,” said Ankur Shah, senior vice president, Prisma Cloud products, Palo Alto Networks. “Prisma Cloud is designed to help protect organizations from code to cloud; and now that customers can visualize their software supply chain, it’s easier to spot, prioritize, and remediate security weaknesses at the onset of development and during delivery pipelines.”

Prisma Cloud Supply Chain Security helps provide a full stack, full lifecycle approach to securing the interconnected components that make up and deliver cloud native applications. It can help to identify vulnerabilities and misconfigurations in code, including open source packages, infrastructure as code (IaC) files and delivery pipelines, such as version control system (VCS) and CI pipeline configurations. It includes the following features:

Auto-discovery: Code assets are extracted and modeled using existing Cloud Code Security scanners.

Graph visualization: Simple and complete inventory of key application and infrastructure asset dependencies to understand weaknesses across the attack surface.

Supply chain code fix: Vulnerable dependencies or misconfigured IaC resources can be remediated using a single consolidated pull request.

Code repository scanning: Identify and fix vulnerabilities in open source packages in application code.

Branch protection rules: Extends policy-as-code to harden VCS and CI/CD configurations (via Checkov) to help prevent code tampering attacks.

With these features, organizations can better assess the attack surface of their delivery pipelines and all connected application and infrastructure resources to be better equipped to help prevent supply chain attacks. Implementing Prisma Cloud supply chain security as part of a Zero Trust architecture is one of the best ways an organization can prevent software supply chain attacks. 

“A thriving community creating a vast array of open-source software helps developers accelerate their coding and product delivery, but it increases the attack surface if you can’t make sure the code is secure," says Melinda Marks; ESG Senior Analyst, Application and Cloud Security. "The new enhancements in Prisma Cloud allow DevOps and security teams to fully understand their software supply chains so they can identify and remediate coding flaws to secure their cloud native applications.”