Third-party dependencies are now one of the largest sources of risk in modern software development. More than 80% of modern applications rely on third-party code, and while this might look normal, it poses a danger.
Developers type “npm install lodash” or “pip install requests,” and often they don’t verify all the packages that come with a single installation. In fact, barely 50% of developers have a formal process for selecting third-party libraries, and many do not monitor all the dependencies that a single library can introduce. In practice, many available third-party libraries never get updated over their lifetimes, so there are no security patches or improvements to address modern cyber threats. This widens the attack surface area and overall vulnerabilities of an organization's security framework. Understanding third-party dependency security can better equip developers to improve their security approach effectively.
Understanding the risks of third-party dependencies raises the question: What can be done to mitigate them? DepSec, also known as third-party dependency security, acknowledges the need to treat third-party code differently from first-party code. It involves identifying, managing, and mitigating risks associated with integrating external code (frameworks, libraries, and packages) into software.
Prioritizing third-party software security enables organizations to safeguard sensitive data, remain compliant with regulations, and ensure continuous operations.
Many modern applications have exposed weaknesses and a larger attack surface due to insecure third-party code that attackers can exploit in various ways. Being able to identify and mitigate these risks is both a win for developers and security experts and a crucial step in maintaining an organization's integrity, resilience, and reputation.
A proactive dependency security approach provides security teams with an early advantage in addressing vulnerabilities before they become exploitable. This prevents breaches and minimizes the risks of extensive damage. Proper training in dependency management with security providers like Security Journey can prepare developers to take more proactive security measures to prevent exploitation.
Third-party software often interacts with client data, and its security infrastructure can be critical to data privacy and safety.
Some of the security risks that tend to arise with third-party dependencies include the following:
Outdated or unpatched software: This is one of the most common third-party security risks that attackers can easily exploit. Most third-party code requires updates to stay relevant and secure. As these codebases are third-party controlled, your security team cannot update or patch perceived vulnerabilities without the code owners' cooperation. This leaves your organization’s security vulnerable to attacks on outdated third-party dependencies.
Compromised Maintainer Accounts: Since your organization doesn’t have control over the dependency, hackers may gain control of a legitimate package maintainer’s account through phishing and infiltrate an existing library with a malicious update.
Data leakage: There is always a risk of uncontrolled data leaks from third-party code and vendors. This exposure can result from improper data handling, insufficient encryption, or even insecure APIs. The result is often data loss or exposure that you might not even be aware of until it’s too late.
Lack of transparency: There is often little to no transparency with third-party code and vendors. While many developers operate on a trust basis, you cannot always know how your data is being handled. Due to this lack of transparency, it can be difficult to identify potential backdoors, insecure coding practices, and any other hidden risks.
The best time to catch and neutralize dependency risks is during your Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). The risks are amplified even more after your app or product goes live, but what is the best approach to identify vulnerable dependencies during the planning, coding, testing, and deployment stages?
Integrating software composition analysis (SCA) into CI/CD pipelines is the best approach to identifying vulnerable dependencies in a timely manner and neutralizing them. When implemented right, SCA identifies vulnerabilities that can be found in the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) database, outdated databases, transitive dependency vulnerabilities, and license compliance issues.
Every developer should be aware of the vulnerabilities that dependencies can be especially susceptible to. These vulnerabilities aren’t exclusive to dependencies, but they do appear over and over again across third-party libraries. Dependencies can be particularly at risk because they may not have been regularly monitored and updated in the past. Not only does this create an entryway for attacks, but the existence of outdated components in dependencies could mean they still have vulnerabilities that were publicly disclosed on the list of Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs). These could be identified by attackers and afford them an easy breach. These are some common ways that attackers exploit vulnerabilities to disrupt systems, including dependencies:
SQL Injection (SQLi): This type of breach involves injecting malicious SQL queries into the application by injecting client input. It’s an easy vulnerability to miss, and it can have very dire consequences, including data theft, data loss, or loss of control over your team's database.
CSRF (Cross-Site Request Forgery): This vulnerability tricks the user’s browser into carrying out unwanted actions on a different site where the user is authenticated.
Remote Code Execution (RCE): This vulnerability allows attackers to execute arbitrary code on a remote machine. This can happen when user input is handled incorrectly, enabling the server to run malicious code.
XSS (Cross-Site Scripting): This vulnerability allows an attacker to place malicious scripts in web pages viewed by other users. Once this is done, the attacker can steal session tokens, cookies, or more sensitive information.
Dependency Confusion Attacks: At its simplest, this vulnerability occurs when a malicious public package mimics a private one. It’s a type of software supply chain attack, and it often relies on disguise, where developers miss the difference between valid dependencies and malicious ones.
There have been many cases where dependency-related issues have resulted in security breaches, but here are three of the more popular examples.
This is one of the more well-known cases in which a critical vulnerability in a widely used Java logging library gave attackers an opening to remotely execute code. This affected millions of systems worldwide.
In this instance, attackers gained access to client repositories and environment variables by using malware on an engineer's laptop to steal a 2FA-backed session cookie.
In this case, a third-party cloud provider’s compromise led to a data breach that affected 560 million records.
It is practically impossible to function efficiently as a developer without third-party dependencies. What matters is how you secure your process. There are best practices to help safeguard how you work with third-party dependencies; here are some of them.
Always do your research: Before using any third-party library, do some research. Check its popularity among other developers, community support, maintenance status, and more. This will save you from heartaches down the line.
Use automated security tools: Automated vulnerability-scanning tools like Snyk, OWASP Dependency Check, and GitHub Dependabot are great first lines of defence for scanning your CI/CD pipeline for vulnerabilities.
Adopt a “shift left” approach: This approach involves taking security against vulnerabilities seriously from the early stages of development.
Use version pinning and lock files: These help prevent malicious updates from being injected into your dependencies.
Regularly update and patch: Make it your duty to update your dependencies. This reduces attacks on older or more compromised versions of a dependency.
Given how deeply third-party code is embedded in the app development ecosystem, evaluating it before use has become critical. Developers should always conduct a maintainer reputation analysis before using any third-party vendor. This helps developers know what maintenance work has been carried out on the code, its frequency, and the concerns of the people behind the code.
There should be periodic commit frequency reviews. This helps your development team stay ahead of the vulnerabilities, allowing them to catch them earlier. Developers can stay aware of vulnerabilities even after deploying their apps through issue tracking, a real-time method.
Developers need to be aware of compliance considerations when using third-party code. Checking the licensing of third-party libraries reduces the risk of both legal breaches and cybersecurity vulnerabilities. Developers should also take code-signing verification seriously to ensure that code from third parties originates from a trusted publisher.
Updating and patching dependencies helps to plug the holes that might be associated with certain code. Doing this during the SDLC is not easy, but using an automated dependency-update bot can simplify patching and testing.
Critical dependencies can have a cascading effect. When left unattended, there is the risk of lateral movement during compromise. Depending on the state of the code when the vulnerability is discovered, containerization, sandboxing, strict network segmentation, or enforcing the principle of least privilege could be the way to go.
Isolation is key to reducing the risk of lateral movement when an issue arises. Developers should be quick to take action to preserve the code without vulnerabilities.
Manual reviews are tedious, especially in a fast-paced environment. To properly secure dependencies, you need tools. The best tools to help with dependencies are software composition analysis SCA tools. These tools scan your dependency tree, map vulnerabilities, and track license risks. They easily integrate into CI/CD and enforce the necessary policies before deployment.
The most popular and effective SCA tools include:
Each of these tools can analyze direct and transitive dependencies, match them against CVE databases, assign security of vulnerabilities using CVSS scoring, and even suggest remediation paths after analysis. It’s usually best to pick the one that integrates with your existing tool stack.
The NIST has been very particular about system security, and the SSDF formalizes what secure teams should be doing. SSDF is outlined in NIST SP 800-218, and it provides a flexible, goal-oriented approach for teams to integrate security into their SDLC.
Following the SSDF practices should help software producers reduce the number of vulnerabilities in released software, reduce the potential impact of the exploitation of undetected or unaddressed vulnerabilities, and address the root causes of vulnerabilities to prevent recurrences.
To continuously monitor and manage dependencies, there has to be a proactive approach that manages the synergy between developer actions and tool implementation.
There needs to be proper education for developers on security measures concerning vulnerable dependencies. An uneducated developer without tools will not be able to take the right actions or spot things that tools might miss.
SCA tools should be part of this proactive approach. They can be used for automated monitoring and scanning. They should be integrated early into the CI/CD pipeline to prevent vulnerabilities from reaching the deployment stage.
At the end of the day, continuous monitoring means real-time alerts, automated CVE tracking, SBOM updates, scheduled dependency audits, and threat intelligence integration. When done right, DevSecOps integrates security into its workflows, not as an afterthought.
DevSecOps is only effective when automated. Automated vulnerability scanning is a powerful defense when critical vulnerabilities appear; it makes it much easier to enforce policies as code, reduces Mean Time to Remediate (MTTR), and prevents vulnerable code from reaching production.
Automated vulnerability scanning acts as a security gate/checkpoint, and it should be integrated into your CI pipeline.
To reduce dependency bloat and, in turn, the attack surface area, a simple and lean cybersecurity approach can never go wrong. Simply use less. Scan your current dependencies and remove unused packages. Do not take up massive libraries and frameworks for small features. Constantly audit dependency trees. Store your approved dependencies in a private repository. Use frameworks that also have minimal dependencies. Minimalism is an effective security strategy.
To build real-world skills, developers need practical training. They need to be able to interact with these vulnerabilities to better manage and respond to them. Training is therefore essential, but not just regular training; it should be a hands-on approach that goes beyond multiple-choice or copy-and-paste.
Such training should be role-based and customized for software engineers, DevOps professionals, and security engineers. This training should also provide learning paths for different stages of expertise, including foundational, intermediate, and advanced levels.
Security Journey is one of the best cybersecurity outfits, providing hands-on training, role-based learning paths, data-driven training assessments, and real human support. They ensure that learning to prevent vulnerabilities is not just a fix but a holistic training regimen that equips developers beyond their current capabilities.
The dangers of supply chain attacks are often underestimated. These dangers do not announce themselves; they hide under trusted code, move silently through build systems, and exploit the implicit trust developers place in third-party dependencies and automated pipelines. The truth is, when training remains theoretical, the discovery of these dangers comes after they have wreaked havoc on the system. This is exactly why hands-on training is necessary for developers.
Practical hands-on training methods help developers acquire essential skills for modern software development, including threat modeling, risk prioritization, secure SDLC integration, and incident response readiness. These are not skills that can be taught only on paper; developers need to be familiar with them in practice. This prevents damage control from being the only solution to exploited vulnerabilities.
As software supply chains become increasingly complex and attacks evolve, effective dependency management has transitioned from a niche expertise to an essential engineering competency. Professionals who are aware of these risks not only create more secure code but also enhance their organization's overall resilience. Reach out today to learn more!