Pipeline Threats Are Here. Your Inventory Won’t Save You.

Modern CI/CD pipelines face escalating threats from compromised third-party components that execute malicious code at build time, with 91% of appsec organizations experiencing supply chain breaches in the past year and a 156% YoY growth in malicious packages. Inventory tools like SBOMs, digital signatures, and provenance attestations cannot prevent these attacks because they operate at rest, not at runtime—by the time a package is flagged as malicious, secrets have already been exfiltrated and builds poisoned. The article argues that only runtime security can effectively defend CI/CD pipelines against these operational threats.