96% of third-party container applications deployed in the cloud infrastructure contain known vulnerabilities.

The Palo Alto Unit 42 researchers reported this in their conclusions on the growing threats organizations face in their software supply chains today.

The report also revealed that several critical misconfigurations and vulnerabilities allowed the Unit 42 team to take over the customer’s cloud infrastructure within days, even for customers with a “mature” cloud security posture.

The report states: “In most supply chain attacks, an attacker compromises a vendor and inserts malicious code in software used by customers. Cloud infrastructure can fall prey to a similar approach in which unvetted third-party code could introduce security flaws and give attackers access to sensitive data in the cloud environment. Additionally, unless organizations verify sources, third-party code can come from anyone, including an Advanced Persistent Threat.”

For Valtix CTO Vishal Jain, he suggested that companies should focus on security during construction, including scanning IaC originals used to build cloud infrastructure and security at runtime.

For more information, read the original story in ZDNet.