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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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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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Visibility and control to scale developer-driven security

With powerful insights into every commit and developer secure code competencies.

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What is SCW Trust Agent?

Effective secure by design strategy is reliant on the developers that implement its principles from initial design to production. This dynamic necessitates the highest level of security competencies across development teams. Developers need language specific knowledge and skills to implement best practices in the code they produce, proactively identify vulnerabilities, and remediate threats. But too often there is a gap between language specific security competencies and the code developers write. This disconnect creates blindspots in an organization’s overall security posture, increases the likelihood for code-based vulnerabilities, and can ultimately block the realization of a developer-driven security culture. SCW Trust Agent is a groundbreaking offering that gives organizations unique visibility across its entire code repository capturing every commit and analyzing it against the developer’s secure code profile. 

SCW Trust Agent builds upon the insights unlocked through SCW Trust Score to analyze how effectively your security program is applied in every commit.

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Value and benefits

• Strengthen security posture
• Optimize the development lifecycle
• Scale developer driven security
• Ensure regulatory compliance 
• Visibility and control in one place
• Fine-tune secure code learning

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Actionable Insights

Detailed views into specific code commits, who made them, and their language-specific security knowledge and skills. Plus team and repo level dashboards that offer insight into how well development teams’ security competencies and code commits are aligned across the entirety of the organization.  

Policy Configuration

Policies and their overall restrictiveness can be set based on the project’s sensitivity and requirements, ensuring language-specific security competencies without slowing down software delivery.

Extensive Code Repository Support

Deploy SCW Trust Agent in any Git-based source code management tool including Github, GitLab, Bitbucket, Azure Repos and more.

Agile Secure Code Learning

SCW Trust Agent is backed by the SCW Agile Learning Platform, powering developer security competency insights and the tools they need to build their knowledge and skills. 

Evaluate your infrastructure and processes to support PCI-DSS requirements

Key updates and timelines for the new PCI-DSS 4.0 requirements

PCI-DSS 4.0 introduces updates to enhance the security of cardholder data, addressing current risks and technological advancements in the payment card industry. The revisions allows organizations to adopt customized security measures if they demonstrate compliance with security objectives, extending multi factor authentication to all access in the cardholder data environment, and strengthening encryption across all networks. Additionally, there is greater emphasis on continuous risk analysis and mitigation, and improving capabilities for timely detection and response to security incidents. These new requirements have a transition period to allow organizations time to adopt the new version while maintaining compliance under the existing standards.

Why CISOs should prioritize the latest pci-dss updates

Adhering to these updated standards is crucial for not only maintaining compliance, but for also protecting against new and emerging cyber threats and risks. By implementing these standards,organizations can be resilient against breaches, thereby protecting their reputations and avoiding potentially hefty fines for non-compliance.

Effective dateof DSS 4.0: March2024; actualized by March 2025.

PCI-DSS 4.0 emphasizes the importance of integrating continuous security processes into daily business operations

Compliance can’t just be a one-time assessment. This approach is vital for CISOs tasked with fostering a culture of security awareness and proactive risk management within their organizations. Embracing PCI-DSS 4.0 also helps drive business value by building a robust security infrastructure that underpins safe and secure payment environments.

Are your developers prepared to deliver compliant software?

Developers sit as an integral - yet often under utilized - part of reaching a state of software security excellence. It is crucial developers understand the broader picture of PCI DSS 4.0 and what they can control and integrate as part of their default approach to a software build.

Requirement 6 of the PCI DSS outlines expectations for developing and maintaining secure software

This includes a variety of items ranging from secure development standards to developer training to configuration and change control management. Any organizations that develop software used in a Cardholder data network (CHD) are required to comply with these mandates.

As outlined in requirement 6.2.2, software development personnel working on bespoke and custom software are trained at least once every 12 months as follows:

• On software security relevant to their job function and development languages.
• Including secure software design and secure coding techniques.
• Including how to use the security testing tools for detecting vulnerabilities in software.

The standard further outlines that training should include at least the following items:

• Development languages in use
• Secure software design
• Secure coding techniques
• Use of techniques/methods for finding vulnerabilities in code
• Processes to prevent reintroducing previously resolved vulnerabilities

Additionally, developers should be familiar with ALL of the attack techniques (outlined in Requirement 6.2.4.) This includes a list of attack categories designed to serve as examples:

• Injection attacks, including SQL, LDAP, XPath, or other command, parameter, object, fault, or injection-type flaws.
• Attacks on data and data structures, including attempts to manipulate buffers, pointers, input data, or shared data.
• Attacks on cryptography usage, including attempts to exploit weak, insecure, or inappropriate cryptographic implementations, algorithms, cipher suites, or modes of operation.
• Attacks on business logic, including attempts to abuse or bypass application features and functionalities through the manipulation of APIs, communication protocols and channels, client side functionality, or other system/application functions and resources. This includes cross-site scripting (XSS) and cross-site request forgery (CSRF).
• Attacks on access control mechanisms, including attempts to bypass or abuse identification, authentication, or authorization mechanisms, or attempts to exploit weaknesses in the implementation of such mechanisms.
• Attacks via any “high-risk” vulnerabilities identified in the vulnerability identification process, as defined inRequirement 6.3.1.

How Secure Code Warrior can help you achieve PCI-DSS 4.0 compliance

The most effective option for training is an agile learning platform where compliance becomes abyproduct of an overarching secure code learning program. Specifically, Secure Code Warrior can help your company reduce vulnerabilities and achieve greater developer productivity by:

• Delivering a solid, consistent understanding of how to keep PCI data safe by addressing gaps in knowledge and providing precision training in the languages and frameworks that your developers use. See more on our Learning Platform.
• Offering a continuous, measured, and established skills verification process to ensure training has been absorbed and put into practice. Learn more about our ready-made secure code training pathways for developers.
• Conducting training via agile learning methods that provide just-in-time, contextual microbursts of learning. Generic, infrequent training is no longer viable, and it won't have the desired impact on vulnerability reduction. Learn more about our supported vulnerabilities.
• Aiding in documenting security training and coding standards, useful for demonstrating compliance during PCI-DSS audits. For a more detailed breakdown of PCI-DSS 4.0, check out our whitepaper, PCI DSS 4.0 Unraveled.

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An industry first benchmark that quantifies the impact of your secure coding program

Software teams across enterprises are under more pressure to deliver quality, secure code faster and without fail before production. This has given rise to the concept of developer-driven security, a powerful movement that results in faster developer productivity, expedited movement throughout the software development cycle, and increased innovation, which ultimately leads to business growth. In the world of secure learning programs, despite undergoing identical secure code programs, teams often yield a spectrum of expertise, encompassing top performers, average achievers, and those who need additional support. But how can you tell what good looks like - and relative to what? Organizations are in need of a benchmark that defines the bell curve of their developers' security standing. A score that can be used as a baseline measurement of the current state of their security learning program, assess its effectiveness, and enable teams to optimize performance.

Value and benefits

• Simple, effective, meaningful data
• Measure security program success
• Increased software quality
• Improved team relationships
• Insight to secure coding skills
• Engaged users & developer retention

Benchmark the current state of your security program

Benchmark your security program against industry peers to establish a standard that aligns with your business goals. Utilizing benchmarks provides a baseline for performance comparison, enabling data-driven decision-making and continuous improvement opportunities to optimize your security posture.

Measured in the context of peers, competition, and global organizations

SCW Trust Score measures your security program's effectiveness by aggregating individual learner skill levels, to calculate your organizational trust score. With benchmarks tailored to Banking & Financial Services, Technology, and Global industries, the report provides insights into your company trust score, industry benchmark distribution, and learner skill level distribution, with customizable drill-down and filter options.

Have confidence in the most comprehensive security skill benchmark in the industry

SCW Trust Score is an industry-first solution that leverages a dynamic algorithm, harnessing insights from over 20 million learning data points collected from 600+ companies and 250,000 learners. It considers an array of learning activities completed within our platform, such as the depth of knowledge acquired about the OWASP Top 10. These unmatched insights help organizations measure their performance against others with confidence.

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Financial services institutions face an array of challenges that hinge on their ability to make efficient, effective use of technology in a fast-evolving financial world.

Organizations are operating in a time of rapid changes—both internally and across the industry—in a highly competitive, cloud-based business environment. In pursuing their ongoing digital transformations, for example, organizations are working to get around the organizational friction that hinders investments into new technologies, such as artificial intelligence, that could accelerate payment processes and other procedures. 

However, there also needs to be more awareness about how this growth impacts the ability to maintain a secure coding environment.

In this guide on security trends for financial service companies, you’ll discover:

• How AI development tools are impacting the software development lifecycle.
• Why increased regulation matters to financial services and how it impacts your team.
• What agile learning can do for your team’s secure coding.
• How the growth of third-party apps will contribute to your security landscape.
• Why the enhanced focus on ROI across teams doesn’t have to worry you when it comes to training.

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