Stopping bugs before they ship: The shift to preventative security

Secure software starts before coding begins. Threat modeling, safer defaults, dependency hygiene, and developer workflow guardrails can help prevent vulnerabilities.

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ZDNET's key takeaways

• Secure software needs to begin before coding.
• Threat modeling helps teams catch risky assumptions early.
• Dependency hygiene can prevent hidden supply chain risks.

Software has a lifecycle. From the spark of an idea through coding, testing, deployment, customer use, and eventual revision or retirement, each line, module, and component becomes more entrenched, more solidified as part of the overall solution, and therefore much harder to fix if problems arise later. Yet, we often fix software solely based on late-stage usage. In this article, we'll discuss proactive strategies to prevent flaws from reaching production before deployment.

Two terms are key to this approach: secure-at-the-source and secure-by-design. Both terms refer to the ...