The technologies used to create products for the Web have evolved rapidly in recent years. JavaScript, the predominant language of the Web, is present today in 97% of modern websites. More interestingly, every Fortune 500 company uses JavaScript — specifically, npm, the JavaScript package ecosystem built by millions of developers globally.
After Node.js environment was released in 2009, the JavaScript open source community really came to life, creating pieces of reusable code (usually called modules or packages) that could be shared by different projects. As this ecosystem evolved, we saw the emergence of full-featured front-end libraries and frameworks that greatly increased development speed. Not only for creating web apps, but also for mobile and desktop apps, all relying on modern JavaScript.
For companies, this meant an unmissable opportunity — by relying on peer-reviewed third-party modules, it became less needed to develop every piece of code in-house. In such a fast-paced industry, cutting product development time and cost directly translated to a competitive edge. Code reuse became the status quo of web development in the enterprise.
As specific product needs were met with specific community-built modules, the number of third-party modules of web apps (also known as code dependencies) quickly built up — today, averaging 1,000 dependencies per web app. And here, we must address security risk.
Each of these third-party modules represents a security liability. Companies have no control over this code bu ..
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