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Agile learning platforms: ROI of developer-driven security

In a fast-evolving software landscape developers now bear the responsibility for secure-by-design products. In this joint report from Secure Code Warrior and Accenture, we explore the challenges around traditional security training and the opportunity costs of disrupting developer workflows. Enter an agile learning platform for secure code, which reduces vulnerabilities by half while enhancing productivity. 

In this whitepaper, our experts at Secure Code Warrior and Accenture unpack: 

• How to calculate the ROI of agile learning with factors like licensing, salaries, and remediation time. 
• Learn how Accenture integrates Secure Code Warrior, transforming secure code training and emphasizing the value of developer education.
• Secure Code Warrior users experience a 148% boost in developer productivity, reduced vulnerability counts, and accelerated release cycles, making proactive security financially viable.

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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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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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