[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":793},["ShallowReactive",2],{"/en-us/blog/why-basic-security-practices-matter-for-everyone":3,"navigation-en-us":37,"banner-en-us":437,"footer-en-us":447,"blog-post-authors-en-us-Heather Simpson":689,"blog-related-posts-en-us-why-basic-security-practices-matter-for-everyone":703,"assessment-promotions-en-us":745,"next-steps-en-us":783},{"id":4,"title":5,"authorSlugs":6,"body":8,"categorySlug":9,"config":10,"content":14,"description":8,"extension":25,"isFeatured":12,"meta":26,"navigation":27,"path":28,"publishedDate":20,"seo":29,"stem":33,"tagSlugs":34,"__hash__":36},"blogPosts/en-us/blog/why-basic-security-practices-matter-for-everyone.yml","Why Basic Security Practices Matter For Everyone",[7],"heather-simpson",null,"unfiltered",{"slug":11,"featured":12,"template":13},"why-basic-security-practices-matter-for-everyone",false,"BlogPost",{"title":15,"description":16,"authors":17,"heroImage":19,"date":20,"body":21,"category":9,"tags":22},"How information security practices help everyone","Security oversights can happen to anyone without the right practices in place. Read here on why security practices matter and what you should use.",[18],"Heather Simpson","https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1749670783/Blog/Hero%20Images/pexels-christina-morillo.jpg","2020-09-14","\n\n{::options parse_block_html=\"true\" /}\n\n\n\nWe asked GitLab sr. security engineer Andrew Kelly about the projects he’s working on, what he’s learned from mistakes he’s made in InfoSec and why writing unit tests for unexpected events is so important.\n\n![Andrew Kelly Headshot](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/akellycirc.png) **Name:** Andrew Kelly\n\n**Title:** Senior Security Engineer, Application Security\n\n**How long have you been at GitLab?**: I joined July 2019\n\n**GitLab handle:** [@ankelly](https://gitlab.com/ankelly)\n\n\n\n#### Tell us what you do here at GitLab:\nI work with GitLab teams and HackerOne reporters to ensure that GitLab products are secure. This includes conducting [application security reviews](/topics/devsecops/), verifying and determining the impact severity of vulnerabilities, collaborating with development and product teams on solutions, and a variety of other application security related tasks.\n\n#### What’s the most challenging or rewarding aspect of your role? I find that one of the most rewarding aspects of my role is working with our HackerOne reporters. The [GitLab bug bounty program](https://hackerone.com/gitlab) receives reports from all sorts of hackers all over the world and I really enjoy the process of investigating and triaging their findings. These reports describe potential vulnerabilities impacting a number of different GitLab applications and systems. Oftentimes, while recreating a vulnerability or investigating a report I end up learning something new about application security or GitLab itself.\n\n#### And, what are the top 2-3 initiatives you’re currently focused on? I’m the [application security stable counterpart](https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/security/security-engineering/application-security/stable-counterparts.html) for the [Growth](https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/development/growth/) and [Enablement](https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/infrastructure-platforms/developer-experience/performance-enablement/) teams. Application Security stable counterparts collaborate with teams throughout the software development lifecycle to assess risk, review code, and otherwise help drive security-conscious outcomes. This has given me an opportunity to work with an amazing and talented group of people on a number of different projects and in much more depth than I might otherwise be able to.\n\nIn addition, I’ve recently been working to help get GitLab’s [Secure tooling](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/application_security/) enabled in several of our major product repositories. This effort has involved coordination across teams, code review, and working with [CI/CD configurations](/topics/ci-cd/). This impacts a significant number of GitLab repositories and I’m excited for the amount of coverage this will provide. I’ve also been involved with configuring and enabling the [GitLab container scanning tools](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/application_security/container_scanning/) to analyze certain docker images.\n\n#### What is the most significant piece of security advice you could provide to a colleague or friend? Write unit tests that cover unexpected cases. Oftentimes when writing software we get focused on expected use cases and our specs tend to reflect that bias. In order to improve application security, I recommend taking the time to think about creative and malicious ways that user controlled input can be abused. This is worth the effort because you will inevitably find situations in which the code did not behave the way you expected and this will help you prevent some security problems before they get released.\n\n#### How did you get into security? I spent a lot of time on the internet growing up. My experiences online and the depiction of hackers in pop culture sparked my interest in security at a young age. It wasn’t until several years into my software development career that I realized it was something I was capable of doing and could do professionally. I started by learning about common web vulnerabilities and looking for them in the codebase that I contributed to as a developer. Over time I continued to learn and build my information security knowledge either on the job or in my freetime.\n#### From the perspective of your role, what’s GitLab doing better than anyone else in terms of security? I’m hesitant to say that we’re doing this better than *anyone* else, but I’m very proud of GitLab’s commitment to transparency. Our teams are very committed to clear, open communication internally and with our customers and community members. This is especially true with regards to security -- transparency is baked into our procedures and processes and is always at the forefront of our minds. From a security perspective, this can be a tricky balancing act but I’m happy that it’s something we take very seriously. I think [Dominic Couture](/company/team/#dcouture) covered this well in a recent blog post ([“Security strengthened by iteration, and transparency\n”](https://about.gitlab.com/blog/security-strengthened-by-interation-and-transparency/)) that I recommend reading.\n\n#### What was your personal worst moment in the Infosec world and how did you recover? Years ago I wanted to build an application using a particular platform’s API, so I searched for and visited what I thought was the correct website and tried to log in. For some reason, my password didn’t work so I tried it a few more times and eventually gave up. Hours later I was alerted to an attempted sign-in to the real website from a location thousands of miles away. At this point, I realized the mistake I had made. In my haste I didn’t notice that the website I was putting my credentials into was actually using a [homograph](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDN_homograph_attack) to trick people whose attention is divided like mine was into giving up their passwords. Luckily I had two-factor authentication enabled and so my account was still protected, but I learned and reinforced some very important lessons that day:\n* Slow down and take the time to verify the address of the website you are visiting before entering any credentials\n* Better yet, bookmark important sites rather than searching for the website you’re looking to log into\n* Use a password manager and ensure you use unique passwords for each website\n* Enable multi-factor authentication everywhere that it is supported\n\nThese last two pieces of advice are something you’ll hear from many security professionals, including some of my coworkers -- like in this post, [\"The sky is not falling: tips to avoid the FUD and protect yourself online\"](/blog/the-sky-is-not-falling/).\n\n#### What would you like to see more of in the industry? I’d like to see vulnerability management integrated into the software development lifecycle across the tech industry. Organizations large and small are typically building applications bundled with dozens, if not hundreds, of dependencies and third-party libraries, all of which have the potential to become security concerns. Tooling and alerting has come a long way to help out, but it still requires organizational discipline and a not insignificant time investment. This can be a time-consuming task and often involves a lot of collaboration on behalf of the engineering and product teams, but is worth every bit of effort.\n\n## Now, for the questions you *really* want to have answered:\n\n#### VIM or EMACS?\nI believe that you have to choose the right tool for the job. It just so happens to usually be VIM, at least for me.\n\n#### What was the first computer you owned?\nThe first computer my family owned was a Commodore 64. My experiences playing video games on that and other early consumer computers paved the way for a lifetime of interest in technology.\n\n#### Show us your frequently used slack emoji list. What do you think this says about you?\nMy current 'Frequently Used' emojis indicate to me that I probably spend a little too much time in the #dog channel 😆. It also appears that emojis are my favorite way to say thank you.\n\n![Andrew Kelly's Emojis](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/akelly_slackmojis.png)\n\n\nPhoto by [Christina Morillo](https://www.pexels.com/@divinetechygirl) from [Pexels](https://www.pexels.com).\n\n",[23,24],"security","inside GitLab","yml",{},true,"/en-us/blog/why-basic-security-practices-matter-for-everyone",{"title":15,"description":16,"ogTitle":15,"ogDescription":16,"noIndex":12,"ogImage":19,"ogUrl":30,"ogSiteName":31,"ogType":32,"canonicalUrls":30},"https://about.gitlab.com/blog/why-basic-security-practices-matter-for-everyone","https://about.gitlab.com","article","en-us/blog/why-basic-security-practices-matter-for-everyone",[23,35],"inside-gitlab","8JphECdqlFMOdyoPub320jBjGPHi4kvcMLsx_wVRHWs",{"data":38},{"logo":39,"freeTrial":44,"sales":49,"login":54,"items":59,"search":367,"minimal":398,"duo":417,"pricingDeployment":427},{"config":40},{"href":41,"dataGaName":42,"dataGaLocation":43},"/","gitlab 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Shadow Takeaways from Jacie","Recap of my experience in the CEO Shadow Program.",[709],"Jacie Bandur","https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1749664102/Blog/Hero%20Images/gitlab-values-cover.png","2021-05-18","\n\n{::options parse_block_html=\"true\" /}\n\n\nHi! I’m Jacie Bandur. I completed GitLab’s CEO Shadow program from 2021-04-26 through 2021-05-07. It was a really enlightening experience. I generally work in Learning and Development and consider myself a lifelong learner. I can’t even explain how much I learned in such a short about of time. I learned a lot about the business. I learned a lot about the product. But learned even more about the importance of iteration in everything we do.\n\n### Qualifications to Participate\n\nI wanted to start this off with touching on qualifications to participate in the program.\n\nI am the type of person that has gone through most of my life thinking I’m not qualified for things. I’m not qualified for that job, that promotion, that program. The list goes on and on.\n\nWhen I saw the [CEO Shadow program](/blog/ceo-shadow-impressions-takeaways/) kick off in 2019, I really wanted to participate. I was a little intimidated. Who wouldn’t be, spending 2 weeks with the CEO of any company? But time passed and all the sudden it was 2021 and I had not taken any steps to participating in the program.\n\nIf you are sitting there waiting for someone to tell you that you are qualified to participate in this program, I’m not big on giving “pep talks,” but here’s me telling you - You are qualified for this program. There’s never going to be a good or perfect time to do it. Tell your manager you want to do the CEO Shadow program. Stop waiting. Sign up today.\n\nNote: Take a look at the [eligibility](https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/ceo/shadow/#eligibility) section of the CEO Shadow page for more information on signing up.\n\n### Pre-Program Tips\n\nThere are many things recommended for shadows to do pre-program outlined on the CEO Shadow handbook page. As I was going through the program there were things that I thought helped me (or would have helped me).\n\nHere are my top 6 recommendations:\n\n1. Make sure your team knows you will be unavailable for 2 weeks. This isn’t a program that can or should be done alongside your normal day to day work. I found catching up from the 2 weeks away kind of difficult because I was trying to keep up on what was going on and I had a bunch of half done things.\n1. Talk with people who have done the shadow program - schedule at least 3 coffee chats with CEO Shadow Alumni.\n1. Have food that is easy to eat quickly. Sid’s meetings are back to back most days, so you will have small amounts of time to eat throughout the day. Sid does eat during calls, which you are welcome to do, too, but if you are taking notes, it is difficult to eat. And this will make you realize why speedy meetings are so important!\n1. Listen to the [Executive Leadership LinkedIn Learning course](https://www.linkedin.com/learning/executive-leadership/).\n1. Be prepared to ask questions. When doing the program virtually, there isn’t a ton of time for asking questions, so when one would come up, I would add it to a note on my computer and ask if there was ever time with just the shadows and Sid.\n1. Take at least 1 day off after the program. Take even a couple of days off if you can! This is recommended on the handbook page, but I can’t stress this enough.\n\n\n### Takeaways\n\n**Group Conversations**\n\nI’ve been at GitLab for almost 4 years. When I joined, I made it a point to attend as many GC’s as I could. I had gotten out of the habit of attending Group Conversations. After attending them again for 2 weeks, I realized how important they are to understand better what is going on across the business. Everything in the organization is so intertwined. It’s helpful to understand what other teams are working on and succeeding in.\n\n**Feedback**\n\nWe should all be giving and receiving feedback often. We have a whole [handbook page on giving and receiving feedback](https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/people-group/guidance-on-feedback/). Read the handbook page and watch the videos, as well. Practice giving feedback. I recommend using the [1-1 agenda](https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/leadership/1-1/suggested-agenda-format/) Sid uses, because Feedback is an essential piece of that agenda, and it makes feedback more of a routine thing.\n\n**Biggest Takeaway**\n\nWe have an incredible team here at GitLab, from Engineering to Product to Sales to People and all the groups in between. There are so many great ideas. I observed the constant reinforcement by Sid to start with something small and build on it. You can ALWAYS make something more complex. It’s hard to go back to something more simple when you start with something complex.\n\nA couple of quotes that I heard from Sid during the program that reinforced this point:\n\n- “Every complex system evolves from a simple system that worked.”\n- “It’s very clear what is the simple solution. We can always make it more complicated as we go on.”\n\nI know they are very similar, but they happened in different meetings on different days, so the point was reinforced repeatedly.\n\nDuring the program, I reflected on the projects that I’am working on. How many of them am I trying to do too much on before releasing. Probably all of them. When I’m working on projects in the future, I will break them down into smaller, more doable chunks. Iteration is hard - it’s a skill to be practicing constantly.\n\n\n### Overall\n\nOverall, the program was really insightful and impactful. If you haven’t participated in it yet, I cannot encourage you enough to do so!\n",{"slug":714,"featured":12,"template":13},"ceo-shadow-recap",{"content":716,"config":728},{"title":717,"description":718,"authors":719,"heroImage":721,"date":722,"body":723,"category":9,"tags":724},"Why I love contributing to GitLab","Making small meaningful changes is what it's all about.",[720],"Austin Regnery","https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1749679501/Blog/Hero%20Images/new-feature.png","2021-05-11","It was mid-morning on a Tuesday in February, and I had 10 minutes in between meetings. So I decided to try and solve a pain point of mine.\nYou see, I had to memorize this HTML snippet to create a collapsible section in GitLab Issue descriptions and comments, but I kept forgetting it. Was it `summary` or `section`? I could never remember.\n```html\n\u003Cdetails>\n\u003Csummary>Insert Title\u003C/summary>\nHidden content\n\u003C/details>\n```\nEven though it is not vanilla Markdown, GitLab knows how to interpret some HTML. I used this formatting trick fairly often since full-page screenshots can occupy a lot of screen space, which leads to excessive scrolling.\nSo I decided to poke around our codebase to see how the other Markdown shortcuts worked. To my surprise, it was pretty straightforward. Each shortcut had a simple text input that mapped to each button. This implementation was simple to replicate since I just needed to copy/paste and replace a few words.\n![Image of Vue and Haml files with editor shortcuts](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/why-i-love-contributing-to-gitlab/vue-haml.png){: .shadow}\nThe Vue and Haml files with the new shortcut\n\nI started a branch and began hacking away at the code. Now, I would never call myself a Software Engineer, but I like to try and make things from time to time. I was able to add a new shortcut to the toolbar to insert this code snippet for me in less than 10 minutes. No more memorizing! Making contributions like this is what makes working at GitLab so special.\nNow, it wasn't ready for production, but I at least had something that worked. I shared it with my UX colleagues in Slack, and it started to gain traction with several up-votes and few constructive comments on how to make it better.\nWith the functionality flushed out, a few other designers helped me get a better icon added to our SVG library. Using clear iconography is critical for communicating information more clearly.\n| Initial Icon | Final Icon |\n| - | - |\n| ![SVG of chevron right icon](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/why-i-love-contributing-to-gitlab/chevron-right.svg) | ![SVG of details block icon](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/why-i-love-contributing-to-gitlab/details-block.svg) |\n\nThe last thing to do was resolve my failing tests, and I had several teammates help me do that.\n![Gif of the shortcut being used](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/why-i-love-contributing-to-gitlab/demo.gif)\n\nToday [this change](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/merge_requests/54938) merged! Now I solved a pain point for me and others. It took a few months to go from idea to production, but the effort was super low. I'd say the return on my initial investment, 10 minutes, is super high.\n> Having a direct impact on a product was never an option for me before joining GitLab.\n\n![Image of participants in the Merge Request](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/why-i-love-contributing-to-gitlab/participants.png)\n\n\nThank you to everyone that helped me deploy this\n",[725,726,727],"UX","product","AWS",{"slug":729,"featured":12,"template":13},"why-i-love-contributing-to-gitlab",{"content":731,"config":743},{"title":732,"description":733,"authors":734,"heroImage":736,"date":722,"body":737,"category":9,"tags":738},"Placebo Lines on the Pipeline Graph","Have you noticed the connecting lines missing on your pipelines lately? Here's why",[735],"Sam Beckham","https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1749679507/Blog/Hero%20Images/ci-cd.png","\n\n{::options parse_block_html=\"true\" /}\n\n\n\nHave you ever pressed the close door button on the elevator, in the hope that you'll save a few precious seconds?\nOr got frustrated at the person stood next to you at the cross-walk, neglecting to press the button?\nWell, maybe they know something you don't, or perhaps you know this already.\nMany buttons in our society lie to us.\n[David McRaney](https://youarenotsosmart.com/2010/02/10/placebo-buttons/) dubbed these, \"Placebo buttons\" and they're everywhere.\nThose elevator doors won't close any faster and the cross-walk button has no effect on the lights.\nThe only lights they control are the lights on the buttons themselves.\nThey give you the feedback you crave, but that's all they're doing.\n\nThese placebos aren't constrained to the physical world, they're prevalent in [UI design](/blog/the-evolution-of-ux-at-gitlab/) too.\nFrom literal placebo buttons like [YouTube's downvote](https://www.quora.com/Does-downvoting-a-comment-on-YouTube-even-do-anything), to more subtle effects like Instagram always [pretending to work](https://www.fastcompany.com/1669788/the-3-white-lies-behind-instagrams-lightning-speed), or progress bars that have a [fixed animation](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/02/why-some-apps-use-fake-progress-bars/517233/).\nThey're everywhere if you know where to look.\n\nAt GitLab, we created a placebo of our own in one of our core features; the pipeline graph.\n\nThose of you who have used our pipeline graph, will be familiar with its appearance.\nThere's a series of jobs, grouped by stages, connected by a series of lines depicting the relationships between the jobs.\nBut these lines might be lying to you.\nThese lines are indiscriminately drawn between each job in a stage, regardless of their relationship.\nThese lines are placebos.\n\n![The old pipeline rendering with lines connecting every job in a stage](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/placebo-lines_old-graph.png)\n\nThis wasn't a problem to begin with.\nA basic pipeline has several jobs across a handful of stages.\nJobs in each stage would run parallel to each other, but each stage would run sequentially.\nIn the image shown above, all the jobs in the test stage would trigger at the same time. Once those jobs had finished, all the jobs in the build stage would trigger.\nWe used rudimentary CSS to draw lines connecting each job in one stage to each job in the next.\nThese lines weren't calculated based on their connections, but still reflected the story they were telling.\n\nSince the introduction of `needs` relationships in [v12.2](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-foss/-/issues/47063), pipelines got a bit more complicated.\nNow you could configure a job in a later stage to trigger as soon as a job in an earlier stage completed.\nLooking at our old example, we could set the API deployment to run as soon as our spec tests passed.\nThis skips the remaining tests and the entire build stage, turning our lines into pretty little liars.\n\nWe had many internal discussions about these lines, and how to show the relationships between jobs.\nThere's the [`needs` visualization](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/directed_acyclic_graph/#needs-visualization), which does an excellent job of displaying these relationships, but the main pipeline graph was still inaccurate.\nFor the past few months, we've been [refactoring the pipeline graph](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/276949), giving it a new lease of life and fixing some of its issues along the way.\nOne of those issues were the faked lines.\nIn the new version, we can accurately draw lines between jobs.\nLines that actually depict the relationships jobs have with each other.\nNow the lines no-longer lie!\n\n![The newer pipeline graph showing the correct needs links between jobs](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/placebo-lines_new-graph.png)\n\nThe above image shows an unreleased version of the pipeline graph.\nYou can see the lines drawn between the jobs to show that the `deploy:API` job can start as soon as the `rspec` job is successful.\nSomething the old lines (shown earlier in this post) would have been unable to depict.\n\nOne unfortunate downside of this is that these lines can be quite expensive to calculate.\nThey're actual DOM nodes, drawn deliberately and placed precisely.\nOn smaller graphs this isn't a problem, but some of our initial tests have found pipelines with a potential 8000+ job connections.\nThat kind of calculation would grind the browser to a halt, and nobody wants that.\n\nAt GitLab, we believe in boring solutions.\nWe make the simple change that sets us on the path towards where we want to be.\nShip it, get feedback, and iterate.\nSo that's what we did.\nIn the first phase of this rollout, we shipped the new pipeline graph with no lines connecting the jobs.\nWe don't have to worry about the expensive calculations, and we still get to roll out the refactored pipeline graph.\n\n![The current (v13.11) pipeline graph showing no links between jobs](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/placebo-lines_current-graph.png)\n\nWe know some of you will miss them, but fear not.\nBoring solutions are just technical debt if you don't iterate on them.\nSo the [improved lines are coming](https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/4509) in a future release, along with several other improvements to the pipeline graph.\nWe're already starting to roll out the new [Job Dependencies](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/298973) view which shows the jobs in a (much closer to) execution order.\nStay tuned for more updates, and watch [Sarah Groff Hennigh Palermo's talk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2EKqKjB7OQ) for the technical side of this effort and a deeper dive into some of the decisions we made.\n",[739,740,741,742],"CI","frontend","agile","design",{"slug":744,"featured":12,"template":13},"placebo-lines-on-the-pipeline-graph",{"promotions":746},[747,761,772],{"id":748,"categories":749,"header":751,"text":752,"button":753,"image":758},"ai-modernization",[750],"ai-ml","Is AI achieving its promise at scale?","Quiz will take 5 minutes or less",{"text":754,"config":755},"Get your AI maturity 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