7 Software Supply Chain Security Best Practices in 2026

Why software supply chain security is critical

Security is only as strong as the weakest link and it's often the software supply chain. More and more high-profile breaches can be traced back to a third-party compromised by a threat actor group through malware or poor identity and access management (IAM) practices.

For example, threat actors gained access to software vendor SolarWinds’ IT monitoring system SolarWinds Orion in 2020. This potentially exposed more than 30,000 of their customers. Another well-known attack involved the Shai-Hulud worm that compromised NPM packages.

As organizations rely more on third-party tools, access, software components, etc., this creates a potential attack vector for threat actors. Your security measures and controls are weakened if a third party with access to your data or application has minimal or no security in place.

The 2025 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report showed that 30% of breaches were linked to third-party involvement, which is double from the previous year.

So it’s important to implement supply chain security, which requires understanding where third-party tools and integrations exist and monitoring them for security threats.

Use the following seven software supply chain security best practices to improve your cloud security posture and reduce security risks.

1. Design a security strategy built for risk resilience

Attackers will get in. It's not an if – but when. So instead of aiming for total prevention, implement a defense-in-depth security strategy that limits what attackers can do when they get past a firewall or other perimeter tool.

A defense-in-depth strategy involves adopting enough security redundancies to limit or mitigate incidents when they occur. Determine what needs the most protection and the risk of attackers reaching that business-critical data.

Once you have a risk profile, start adopting additional security technology, controls, and policies where they make sense. For example, implement network microsegmentation so that if threat actors get past initial defenses, they don’t automatically have access to everything.

A good methodology to consider is zero trust, which involves hardening security around a policy of “never trust, always verify.”

Consider:

• Data encryption: Is your data encrypted while at rest, in use, and in transit?
• IAM controls: Do you have role-based access in place and use the principle of least privilege to govern account permissions?
• File integrity monitoring: How will you discover if a rogue account makes changes to sensitive files and systems?

2. Use secure coding practices

If your organization builds applications, ensure that developers follow the secure software development lifecycle (SSDLC). SSDLC is part of the shift-left movement that makes security part of every phase of application development.

The SSDLC is meant to be an ongoing process that enables organizations to follow security best practices in place and keep application development secure.

Some ways to implement secure CI/CD pipelines include:

• Determining security risks for your specific app and its userbase and how to mitigate them.
• Implementing secure authentication and authorization.
• Testing builds against common security vulnerabilities and weaknesses.
• Auditing build processes to ensure that they account for the latest security best practices.
• Validating third-party components and dependencies before using them.
• Adopting code analysis, vulnerability scanning, and security frameworks, such as OWASP Security Knowledge Framework or OpenSSF Supply Chain Levels for Software Artifacts.

3. Mitigate third-party risk with strict security hygiene

Part of your risk equation should consider how to manage security risks introduced by using third-party software components, dependencies, or libraries.

This requires spending time understanding a publisher’s security measures or whether an open source library will get support in the future if a vulnerability is found.

Unsurprisingly, you can minimize risk by limiting where you use third-party components and dependencies when possible. Develop what you can in house and then use other components only after a thorough evaluation of the third party’s security hygiene practices.

This involves researching the publisher to understand how regularly they update or patch their software. Learn what their current security practices are and whether they are stringent enough for your industry and your risk appetite.

CISA recommends drafting contracts with publishers that outlines the necessary levels of security and controls for vulnerability mitigation. Require the third party to provide a self-attestation of their security practices, share a software bill of materials (SBOM) for their software, and explain their procedures for contacting customers in the event of a security flaw.

After receipt of the software, your security teams should examine it to verify its security. Scan the dependency with, for example, a software composition analysis (SCA) tool, before adding to any build.

If you’re not working with a publisher for use of their dependency, but using an open source library freely available for business use, thoroughly examine it to ensure it’s secure enough for your usage. Research how frequently it gets updated and how quickly vulnerabilities are remediated.

Lastly, ensure you’re using the correct library or software component. Threat actors often upload similarly named dependencies in the hope someone adds it to their application without looking at it too closely to guarantee its provenance.

4. Create and use SBOMs

SBOMs play a critical role in software supply chain security. An SBOM is a complete inventory of every component, dependency, library, APIs, etc. that comprises an application. It also includes versions and release information, software licenses, and developer information.

SBOMs provide transparency and visibility into your software supply chain, which enables your organization to discover and remediate security vulnerabilities.

To understand your attack surface, speak with publishers and suppliers about providing you with an SBOM that includes detailed information into every library and dependency in their software or component.

Make sure these SBOMs get updated whenever changes occur to software. Keeping them up to date is critical to understanding where vulnerabilities exist and what ones have been remediated.

Consider integrating the Vulnerability Exploitability eXchange (VEX) into your SBOMs. VEX provides information about whether any vulnerabilities are exploitable, which should factor into your risk management process.

5. Use runtime security and monitoring

Detection and response is important to discovering a supply chain attack before it causes too much damage to your organization. Early detection is important, which means that static scanning alone isn’t ideal.

Instead, organizations need to implement runtime security to continuously monitor and protect cloud workloads. Runtime security provides real-time threat detection against malware, code injection attacks, zero-days, and more.

Continuously monitoring for indicators of compromise is integral as more threat actors use dynamic attacks to target containers, virtual machines, and other workloads.

Runtime security identifies threats and suspicious or anomalous behavior at execution. Incorporate runtime protection for your CI/CD pipelines to discover if a software component or dependency begins to act suspiciously.

6. Test and remediate vulnerabilities or weaknesses

With security measures and controls and self-attestations from third-party suppliers or publishers in place, it’s time to put them to the test. You need to know whether your tools and systems can detect suspicious behavior and that they generate the necessary alerts.

Use security testing, such as penetration testing, to simulate an attack and see how well your defenses hold up if an attacker has stolen account credentials. Pen testing illuminates whether you can detect and mitigate attacks if your third-party supplier gets compromised.

Security testing can answer common questions you may have about a third-party vendor’s security, including:

• How strong are their IAM controls?
• How secure are their hardware dependencies?
• Is their API security up to snuff?
• Are there user accounts with excessive permissions?

Once you understand where weaknesses exist, take the time to remediate the ones you can control and implement better defenses to mitigate attacks that use third-party security flaws.

7. Prepare your incident response

As mentioned earlier, you can’t prevent all attacks, so you need to ensure your organization can move quickly after a vulnerability or other security threat is discovered. One way to do that is by creating an incident response playbook and practicing it.

Develop the incident response playbook and involve all relevant stakeholders and decision-makers. Determine how to respond when a vulnerability is identified or if an attack is detected.

Once you have your playbook, perform security exercises with those involved in the event of an actual attack. Run through the exercises to make sure everyone feels prepared and understands their role to speed up response time.

During a post-incident recap, review how well the playbook worked or how it didn’t work. Use the feedback to improve your incident response for next time.

Learn more about supply chain security

As more and more threat actors target third-party vendors as an attack vector into your organization, it’s important that you have software supply chain security in place.

Use our guide on software supply chain security to understand the fundamentals and get advice on how to secure your organization from supply chain attacks. Learn about additional software supply chain security best practices.

Sysdig can help secure your organization against supply chain attacks by detecting suspicious activity at runtime with Falco and Sysdig Secure. Our vulnerability management solution can also be applied in pipeline, to registry, and at runtime to discover security vulnerabilities.

Feel confident that you can discover supply chain security threats and remediate them just as quickly.