Nothing brings the value of cybersecurity into focus quite like being in the throes of a breach. As we approach the mid-point of National Cybersecurity Awareness Month, it's a good time to remember that you'll never have more time to prepare for a threat than you do right now.
The sense of urgency is particularly critical for developers, who have become the target of malicious actors looking for a weak spot. The software supply chain, once a behind-the-scenes aspect of development, is now a primary target. The rapid adoption of open source has accelerated innovation, but it has also multiplied the surface area for potential vulnerabilities. Understanding how to secure dependencies is mission-critical.
In today's environment, awareness alone is just the starting point for action. Federal cybersecurity teams today face dual pressures: expanding mandates and contracting timelines. Moving from awareness to assurance means embedding security into the design, development, and deployment of software from the very start.
Rising Expectations and Shrinking Margins in Today's Fed Cybersecurity Landscape
The convenience of open source software comes with inherent risks. Attackers are increasingly targeting developers directly, using sophisticated methods to inject malicious code into the software supply chain. In 2024 alone, Sonatype reported a 156% year-over-year increase in malicious packages.
Policy momentum has picked up in an effort to address this trend. Initiatives such as Executive Order 14028, which calls for visibility into the software supply chain, OMB M-22–18, which mandates attestation, and the Secure Software Framework (SSWF) program underscore the scale and complexity of protecting modern systems.
We believe security can't be treated as abstract or aspirational. It can be measured, automated, and proven. Through real-time component intelligence, policy-as-code, and trusted software bills of materials (SBOMs), agencies can confidently demonstrate compliance while accelerating mission delivery.
Secure by Design in Practice
The phrase "Secure by Design" has become central to national cybersecurity strategy, but it's not new. Long before it became a headline, it was an engineering philosophy: build systems resilient enough to withstand failure, intrusion, and change.
At Sonatype, we align with this principle not because it's mandated, but because it's sound engineering discipline. We help federal developers implement these practices through three essential pillars:
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Visibility: Agencies gain full insight into every open source dependency via comprehensive SBOM management. Every component is identified, classified, and continuously monitored for risk.
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Traceability: Provenance, version history, and policy controls are maintained at scale, ensuring that every piece of software can be traced back to a trusted source.
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Automation: Security policies are enforced directly in CI/CD pipelines, transforming manual review into continuous, real-time assurance.
This approach aligns with the national "secure software by default" direction championed across the cybersecurity community in a way that's not an add-on, but a defining attribute of every release.
Operationalizing Awareness
While Cybersecurity Awareness Month promotes vigilance, the real challenge is operationalizing awareness — turning principles into day-to-day practice. Federal agencies don't just need to know what secure development looks like; they need to implement it at mission speed and scale.
That's where Sonatype bridges policy and practice. Our solutions are built specifically to support EO-driven requirements for transparency, attestation, and accountability:
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Sonatype SBOM Manager enables scalable generation, ingestion, and validation of software bills of materials, helping agencies meet both OMB and NIST guidance.
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SAGE (Sonatype Air-Gapped Environment) extends secure development and dependency management capabilities to isolated and classified networks without internet access.
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Sonatype Lifecycle and Sonatype Repository Firewall – Prevent vulnerabilities, license violations, and malicious components from entering the build pipeline automatically — before deployment ever occurs.
Together, these tools form a comprehensive operational model that accelerates development, reduces manual workload, and helps maintain compliance with federal directives. The result is that agencies can move faster with no compromise to security.
AI and Automation Is the New Awareness Frontier
As artificial intelligence transforms both defense and civilian operations, a new layer of software supply chain risk has emerged: AI model integrity. Awareness now extends beyond code dependencies to include training data, model artifacts, and machine learning pipelines. Just as federal teams apply governance to traditional software components, they must now ensure AI systems are trustworthy by design — that models are trained on verifiable data, free from unapproved code, and transparently documented.
Sonatype's approach to component governance directly supports this new paradigm. By extending SBOM principles to AI, agencies can trace model dependencies, validate open source integrations, and maintain continuous visibility into the evolving AI supply chain. This philosophy underpins our ongoing federal blog series on AI risk management frameworks and mission assurance, where we explore how automation and provenance can transform AI security from reactive oversight to proactive control.
Building a Culture of Continuous Security
Cybersecurity Awareness Month is a catalyst — but the real goal is a culture of continuous security. Awareness can't be an annual campaign; it must be a daily habit embedded in every phase of software development.
A simple checklist helps teams stay grounded:
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Know your components. Understand every dependency in your software stack.
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Automate what you can. Manual reviews can't scale to modern development speeds.
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Validate before you deploy. Trust, but verify — especially in distributed environments.
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Educate continuously. Developers are the first line of defense; keep awareness active.
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Measure, then improve. Security maturity grows through metrics, not anecdotes.
By adopting this continuous improvement mindset, agencies can ensure that awareness translates into sustainable, measurable resilience.
Cybersecurity Awareness Month reminds us that defending the software supply chain is a shared responsibility. But lasting success depends on shared capability. By embedding intelligence, automation, and governance into the fabric of software delivery, agencies can achieve not just awareness, but assurance. To learn more about how Sonatype can help you turn awareness into action, contact us today.
Antoine Harden brings 25 years of public-sector technology leadership spanning Oracle, CA Technologies, Google, Elastic, and startups like Imperva and Exabeam, to his current role leading Sonatype's federal efforts. He combines strategic insight into federal procurement and mission requirements ...
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