60 Percent of Developers Don't Trust the Security of their Applications

New research suggests that attacks based on open source code vulnerabilities will increase by 20 percent this year.

• By Joe McCann
• Jan 11, 2018

60 percent of developers aren’t confident in the security of their applications, and only 31 percent feel confident that their code doesn’t contain vulnerabilities, according to a new joint developer survey from NodeSource and Sqreen.

Enterprises are increasingly turning to open source tools like Node.js to save time and money while creating higher quality applications. According to Forrester, more than 76 percent of developers are currently using open source technology “at some level.”^[1]

Yet, this enthusiastic adoption is not without risks. New research suggests that attacks based on open source code vulnerabilities will increase by 20 percent this year.^[2]

While the developer community fully understands the risks of operating in the open internet and the complexities of building reliable, secure code, these same developers are not taking advantage of tools that can identify and mitigate threats. 

Surprisingly, fewer than a third of developers combine manual and automatic code reviews to search for flaws, or use automated tools to discover vulnerable modules. And a full 40 percent don’t check if there are known vulnerabilities in their third-party dependencies.

“Our survey results clearly demonstrate that security is a concern for developers — but not a priority,” said Joe McCann, CEO of NodeSource.

Only 35 percent of companies with fewer than 1,000 employees combine both code reviews and automated tools to check for vulnerabilities. Larger organizations make this more of a priority, with 62 percent saying they do both.

Prevention is a key piece of the security puzzle, but identification and remediation of attacks are also critical. Shockingly, the vast majority of the developers (79 percent) have poor to no insight into when their applications are under attack. And fewer than a quarter of Node.js developers use any form of real-time protection against attacks.

“Node is revolutionizing development for enterprises, but there is a lot of work to do to ensure the ecosystem remains secure,” said Jean-Baptiste Aviat, Co-Founder and CTO of Sqreen. “Developers have a wide array of security tools at their disposal that they are simply not using. We have more work to do evangelizing the importance of security tools for the health of the Node ecosystem.”