Jake’s post — est. reading time: 9 minutes

In today’s DevSecOps landscape, organisations rarely build software in isolation. Instead, they operate in dynamic ecosystems—a web of integrations, libraries, cloud services, plugins, and outsourced infrastructure. These connections offer agility and scalability but also bring risk. And increasingly, that risk is inherited.

From CI/CD plugins and infrastructure-as-code tools to API gateways and telemetry platforms, every third-party component embedded in a pipeline becomes part of the operational chain. Yet, too often, these elements are treated as safe by default—adopted on trust, integrated without runtime scrutiny, and left unmonitored once deployed. In doing so, enterprises expose themselves to a new class of vulnerabilities—ones that originate outside their control but execute within their walls.

When Your Pipeline Isn’t Yours Alone

Consider a recent case involving a fast-scaling technology firm that relied on a popular third-party CI platform. One of its plugins, installed by a DevOps engineer to simplify credential injection during deployment, was compromised. The attacker modified the plugin to exfiltrate environment variables during builds—unnoticed. These variables included secrets and tokens for production systems.

No alarms were raised. No perimeter defences were breached. No developer introduced buggy code. The incident was discovered only during an audit triggered by a separate compliance concern. The breach came through a trusted third-party integration—undetected and authorised.

This incident underscores a stark truth: inherited risk isn’t abstract. It’s immediate, intimate, and highly operational. Attackers don’t need to breach your environment directly if they can exploit the trust relationships embedded within your pipeline. In modern software delivery, your third-party dependencies have privileged access. They operate as you. That’s a gift to adversaries—and a governance nightmare for CISOs.

The Nature of Inherited Risk

What makes inherited risk so dangerous is its subtlety. When you adopt a plugin, integrate a hosted runner, or connect to a SaaS API, you are executing foreign code within your environment. This code often:

• Runs with elevated privileges during builds or deployments
• Accesses environment variables, secrets, and configuration files
• Communicates externally, often without central logging
• Falls outside the scope of traditional AppSec scanning tools

Despite this, many DevSecOps teams continue to evaluate third-party risk through the lens of vendor paperwork: questionnaires, certifications, security whitepapers. These artefacts may prove helpful at procurement, but they say little about how software behaves at runtime. In reality, the integration point is where risk lives—not the contract stage.

Meanwhile, due to decentralised tool adoption in DevSecOps cultures, it’s not uncommon for engineers to install integrations without involving security teams. Without clear oversight, these tools escape normal governance and often remain invisible until something breaks—or is breached.

Runtime Is Where Risk Becomes Real

Traditional security methods often focus on prevention—verifying packages before use, checking licensing, assessing known CVEs. While useful, these controls fall short when a third-party tool is updated post-deployment, changes behaviour silently, or is subverted via its own supply chain.

Runtime visibility is the missing piece. Without it, enterprises can’t see what integrations are doing in production, what files they touch, what secrets they access, or what endpoints they reach. When security ends at the point of integration, threat actors exploit that blind spot. And in a zero-trust world, no integration should be above scrutiny.

The CISO Mandate: Trust but Always Verify

For the C-suite, inherited risk must become a board-level conversation. Supply chain breaches are no longer rare outliers—they’re routine. From SolarWinds to compromised npm packages, attackers increasingly weaponise the trust embedded in modern development practices.

Executives should start by asking:

• Do we know every third-party component operating in our CI/CD pipeline?
• Are these integrations monitored at runtime for behavioural drift?
• Is access to secrets gated by principle of least privilege?
• Do we treat vendor updates as deployment events with potential impact?

If the answer to any of these is no, the organisation is likely assuming trust where it hasn’t been verified—and that’s a recipe for operational fragility.

Modern Governance for Modern Pipelines

Inherited risk demands modern countermeasures. Here’s how leading organisations are shifting their practices:

Continuous Vetting: Integrations must be re-evaluated regularly, not just during procurement. Automate the detection of updates to dependencies and scan them at each build stage for anomalous behaviour or embedded threats.

Secrets Hygiene: Third-party tools should never be granted static credentials. Use short-lived tokens, enforce strict access scopes, and rotate secrets frequently. Secrets management should include audit trails specifically for third-party use.

Runtime Monitoring: Invest in behavioural analytics that cover your integrations. Detect unexpected outbound connections, unusual API calls, or privilege escalations that originate from dependencies.

Zero-Trust Enforcement: Apply least privilege not only to users but also to code. Segregate build environments, isolate external integrations, and apply strict egress rules. Assume breach at every layer—including trusted tooling.

Procurement Is Not the End—It’s the Beginning

Vendor due diligence doesn’t stop with paperwork. In fact, it’s where real oversight begins. Leading DevSecOps teams integrate vendor tools into a full lifecycle of visibility, including:

• Asset inventories with owner attribution
• Dynamic risk scoring based on usage and exposure
• Security SLAs that bind vendor integrations into response workflows
• Kill switches or circuit breakers to disable risky plugins at speed

This level of control transforms inherited risk from a passive threat into a manageable component of your operational model. It aligns third-party risk with enterprise resilience—and that’s the standard modern companies must meet.

From “Used By Us” to “Trusted By Us”

Most organisations can tell you what they use. Far fewer can tell you which components they trust—and why. The gap between those two realities is the space attackers exploit. Your pipeline may be cloud-native, agile, and automated. But if it’s wired together by invisible hands, you’ve built speed on top of uncertainty.

Digital maturity is no longer about how many tools you use. It’s about how well you control what those tools can do. That means bringing inherited risk into the light—tracking it, monitoring it, and revalidating it continuously.

Conclusion: When Trust Fails, It Fails Silently

Third-party risk isn’t an abstract compliance issue. It’s a live, executable threat vector that bypasses traditional security boundaries. In a world where pipelines are stitched together from dozens of external pieces, every one of those pieces deserves scrutiny—not once, but always.

Executives must stop assuming that supply chain risk is someone else’s problem. If a dependency runs with your privileges, accesses your secrets, and ships your product—it is your problem. The only way to control the risk you inherit is to make it visible, testable, and accountable.

Is your organisation still trusting by default—or have you earned the right to trust what runs inside your pipeline?