Certified: The Security+ Prepcast

Modern cybersecurity is deeply interconnected, and vulnerabilities in your vendors, partners, or third-party software can easily become vulnerabilities in your own environment. In this episode, we explore supply chain attacks—like trojanized software updates, compromised developer tools, or backdoors inserted at the firmware level—that undermine trust and introduce malicious code before it even reaches your network. We also discuss cryptographic weaknesses such as outdated algorithms, poorly implemented encryption libraries, weak key management, and misuse of random number generators that can expose sensitive data to brute-force or collision attacks. These weaknesses often hide in plain sight, undetected for months or even years, as was seen in high-profile attacks like SolarWinds and compromised SSL libraries. Defending against them requires strong vendor management, secure development pipelines, cryptographic agility, and vigilant dependency tracking. Trust is not a static decision—it must be evaluated, monitored, and re-evaluated continuously across every link in the chain.