DigitalOcean Decreases Security Debt with Secure Code Warrior

DigitalOcean offers scalable compute resources and a suite of cloud solutions that enable developers to deploy, manage, and scale applications effortlessly. DigitalOcean’s products and services are delivered through their R&D teams who focus on delivering new products that enable developers and businesses to spend more time building software that changes the world.

Situation

DigitalOcean has grown rapidly over the years, and their engineering teams have expanded to support this growth, which has brought security challenges. With larger teams in place, DigitalOcean sought ways to ensure that their developers were skilled in identifying common patterns that arose in design reviews so that they could proactively prevent them from recurring. Ultimately, they wanted a program that would build their software security proficiency and put them into a proactive and offensive mindset when it came to secure code.

“We needed a solution that was developer specific, hands on, and focused on the risks that our organization was facing.”

Action

The Product Security team at DigitalOcean focuses on holistic vulnerability management, and they needed a hands-on solution that would allow developers to learn, test, and apply their knowledge — essentially building their security muscle for issues relevant to their organization.

Using Secure Code Warrior, they customized the right secure coding program that focused on specific vulnerabilities that they identified as prevalent during their security and design reviews.

Building programs with these basics provided their development teams with a strong foundation to focus on these identified issues.  The Secure Code Warrior agile learning platform allowed developers to review and identify code that had vulnerabilities, and understand the impact of the code by ‘seeing the vulnerability in motion’ through learning modules. This combination was effective in building the developers’ security posture and knowledge base.

Results

One of the most notable outcomes was the ability to quickly and regularly reinforce secure coding practices, which led to a marked decrease in security debt across teams. Overall, DigitalOcean has found that teams trained with SCW were not only more adept at identifying and mitigating security issues, but they also now have the confidence to push the boundaries of innovation without compromising security.

This reduction in security debt translated into increased productivity and efficiency, as developers spent less time addressing security flaws and more time focusing on developing new features and improvements. The enhanced security posture of these teams also meant that DigitalOcean could deliver higher quality, more secure products to their customers, strengthening their competitive edge in the industry.

What's Next

Looking ahead, DigitalOcean is excited about the potential of SCW Trust Score to further enhance their security training and benchmarking capabilities. SCW Trust Score will enable DigitalOcean to draw detailed comparisons across teams and departments providing a clear picture of their overall security posture.
As they continue to evolve and adapt to the ever-changing security landscape, DigitalOcean is confident their engineering and developer teams will not only continue to reduce security debt, but also use the security surplus they earn with Secure Code Warrior to push the boundaries on developer productivity, velocity and innovation.

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Secure Code Warrior reduces vulnerabilities where they begin - at the code level. Our agile learning platform gives developers the ability to learn how they want,  with the most complete and reliable vulnerability content in the industry today.

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IAG Group is the name behind many of the leading insurance companies in the Asia-Pacific region, underwriting policies for millions of customers to the tune of approximately AUD $11.4 Billion in premiums per annum. Bianca Wirth is the Corporate Security Education & AwarenessManager for IAG Group. Highly attuned to the need for tight security awareness and practices within the development team, she set about creating a truly innovative, optimum environment in which the team could learn vital secure coding techniques.

ENTER: Game of Codes

The challenge

Developers are often stretched for time, with multiple deliverables and projects on the boil. However, keeping up-to-date with security best practice is of utmost importance to any organisation, let alone one with millions of sensitive customer data profiles to keep safe from hackers. Bianca and her team set clear objectives on the path to making their cybersecurity initiatives more robust. They determined that minimising the attack surface area inIAG-developed applications was the priority, and they would approach this through educating developers to identify and fix critical and high-risk vulnerabilities. Lengthy secure coding training courses certainly exist, but they can be laborious, tedious, and take key staff away from development projects with strict delivery timelines, which creates pressure across the business. The need to up skill the dev team quickly, with minimal impact to workload and operations, became apparent. And with developers across Australia andNew Zealand, each working on systems that weren’t necessarily the same, this was no small feat.

“This year, I made a change to our source code which removed an SQL injection vulnerability. For there cognition of this I give credit to Game of Codes. Even just keeping secure coding top of mind is helpful. The competition is a good way to push people to try their best… because let’s face it, security isn’t everyone’s most enjoyable topic, so this is a good way to get people involved.” R, IAG Developer

The implementation

Bianca strategised the rollout of a gamified training experience, working in conjunction with her team and Secure Code Warrior in the implementation of tournaments and training to promote the skills of their in-house developers. For this, it was essential to set up a sound communication strategy, as well as cater to the different motivations and personalities that staff have in adopting an all-new platform and using it to its full potential:

“We designed a communications plan, consisting of how we’re going to communicate to staff and key stakeholders the need-to-know points, key messages and what incentives we’re giving them to respond to as well. Most people really enjoy the gamified experience. It just depends on their personalities, their motivation and what drives them. So, that’s why we try to cater for a whole different range of motivations for people. For some, they love the prizes, for others the achievement aspect itself is enough of a factor,” she said

Bianca and IAG expertly showcased Secure Code Warrior’s gamified learning platform, transforming their tournament into a fun competition experience heralded as the ‘Game of Codes’, with staff placed into medieval-themed houses (complete with branded player merchandise) going head-to-head in a battle worthy of its HBO-produced namesake.

The tournament has even been taken to the international stage, with an upcoming Australia vs New Zealand match-up soon to launch. This gives IAG the chance to identify the leading security champions across both countries, as well as ensuring teams are up-skilling together.

The result

Game of Codes is, in effect, a specialised training program. Its roll-out as an interactive, fun tournament ensured that staff remained engaged in a variety of ways, but the core practicality of the exercise remained: to give developers the skills required to identify and thwart high-risk vulnerabilities in IAG-developed applications.

By ensuring that both developers and security teams are working with a security-first mindset, as well as being equipped to not just identify, but fix vulnerabilities from the beginning, IAG anticipates seeing a reduction in costly penetration testing exercises and strain on the team that carries them out.

In addition to this vital competency continuing to be developed, Game of Codes also aided in relationship building, injecting a sense of camaraderie and friendly competitiveness between involved teams, while also helping individuals feel more confident in their secure coding abilities when seeing them measured in a point-scoring tournament environment.

Bianca stated that the internal support for the program was immense, with a positive reception from the executive suite. This also led to an ambassador program, where individuals keen to promote the program and champion security within the organisation could get involved:

“It has been fantastic exposure for some developers and an excellent promotion of their skills. They’re getting benefit from that in their own jobs as well which is important to see.”

Far from being ‘just a game’, or simply a more pleasant way for department managers to burn through compliance training, Game of Codes offers a high-retention, engaging solution that turns security novices into security champions quickly, which is essential in minimising the risk of a large-scale breach.

And the ultimate advice, from Bianca herself:

“If you roll out any program and expect people to just use it, it's not going to work. You need to design a program around it where you initiate and motivate changed behaviour. What we built was essentially a developer change management program, focused on security.”

“After going through the training sessions on Game of Codes, I find I am more interested in security and thinking about security when creating automation tests.I am a senior tester in an agile team and these training sessions have motivated me to learn more about security testing and think of it as a possible specialisation.” A, IAG Senior Tester

FAST FACTS 

• In addition to gamified learning, IAG is also using Secure Code Warrior as a skill-testing tool in developer recruitment.
• They are in the process of rolling the program out to 100% of their development team, with 55% already active in the system.  
• They have developed a key set of internal metrics allowing them to measure the success of the program in minimising risk and reducing costs over time.
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Our platform allows you to foster a community centric cybersecurity network with engaging coding competitions & tournaments, highlighting real-world vulnerabilities and secure coding practices.

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The concept of “shifting left” has been part of the cybersecurity industry discourse since the early 2000s. First rising to prominence as part of evolving Agile, followed by DevOps, development methodologies, the looming threat of large-scale cyberattacks necessitated a defense strategy as the world’s digital footprint grew.

Still, approaching twenty years after the “shift left” movement promised to revolutionize secure software delivery, we still face a deluge of insecure code, low levels of organizational security awareness, and subsequent cybercrime that escalates in volume and potency year-on-year. By 2025, it is estimated that cyberattacks will cost the world $10.5 trillion USD annually.

An ever-widening cybersecurity skills chasm has ensured we have been low on experienced security personnel for quite some time, and despite being a critical pain point for most security leaders and CISOs, we simply cannot afford to wait patiently for a miracle change in circumstance. The current approach is flawed, and we need to revitalize and utilize the resources we have right in front of us, and truly, relief is possible in the form of security-skilled developers.

In this white paper, security expert and Secure Code Warrior CTO & Co-Founder Matias Madou, Ph.D. will discuss:

• The six pillars you need to roll out effective security education and enablement for your development cohort.
• Lessons learned from ten executives implementing security programs at the enterprise level.
• Common pitfalls to avoid on your road to success.

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TL;TR

About Colgate-Palmolive

Colgate-Palmolive Company is a marquis consumer products brand known and loved across households everywhere. Despite being more than two centuries old, they are an innovative growth company leveraging digital to reimagine a healthier future for people, their pets, and the planet.

Situation

Colgate-Palmolive, just like nearly every other organization, is going through a digital transformation to better serve its customers, and this has led to a shift in how the organization approaches application security.

Alex Schuchman, CISO at Colgate-Palmolive, puts it this way:

“It is very important to us that we are protecting our customer’s data and therefore are able to build trust—not just in our products but in the digital interactions our customers have with us."

But for Alex, the challenge was to secure the root source of potential customer data breaches—the code itself.

“Working on the build side of applications was really helpful when I made the switch over to my role as CISO. I understand the pain of getting tickets back from AppSec or the frustration of missing deadlines because of re-work. As a result, my goal as CISO hasn't just been increasing security in the software development lifecycle, but also streamlining how it is implemented.”

Action

Colgate-Palmolive approached this challenge by breaking up its security training into smaller, bite-sized chunks. This made it more palatable for developers so they could fit it into their workflow, instead of the long, monolithic compliance training they were used to. By leveraging Secure Code Warrior’s agile, in-context approach to secure code learning, developers were able to understand vulnerabilities in the context of their real-life projects – leading to higher engagement and long-term retention of secure coding skills.

“I wanted to roll out these best practices while keeping the developers engaged,” says Alex. “We still have mandated critical parts of the program but keeping the training manageable and listening to developer feedback has helped the program be successful.”

Colgate-Palmolive implemented an Okta workflow that gates the GitHub repository, allowing only developers who've passed specific SCW assessments access for pull requests, as depicted in the diagram below.

Results

According to Alex, “We understood that to optimize for success we needed to have our developers on-board from the start. So we made sure the developers knew they would be a critical part of the success of the program. As a result, we found that there was a much better relationship between our security team and our developers, and it really felt like we were working together as a team on the program. We are continuing to expand and scale the security maturity program, building on the success we have already enjoyed.”

Key takeaways

1. Clearly define program goals and emphasize developer input and engagement. Developers are more likely to buy-in to a secure code learning program that is built into their workflow and integrated with the dev tools they use every day.
2. Using an SSO tool such as Okta to gate the code repository incentivizes the team.  Only developers with a passing score on specific SCW courses and assessment are permitted to make pull requests.  
3. Over time, build a security culture that promotes a strong working relationship between AppSec and Development teams.

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