In the first half of 2022, there were an estimated 236.1 million ransomware attacks globally. No doubt, it’s becoming more necessary to secure your organization and software products against cyber threats and security vulnerabilities.
Software security issues include bugs, authentication, unsecured authentication, data exposure, libraries with vulnerabilities, and misconfigured settings. All these can be exploited by malicious actors who want to gain access to your system.
That's why it's crucial to have a solid security development plan to protect against (or at least warn about) external threats, such as ransomware, malware, phishing, and DDoS attacks.
The good news is, you most probably don't have to start from zero, but build on your existing development processes.
In this post, we collected some of the most popular DevSecOps tools for threat modeling and incident monitoring, alerting, and visualization. Some are open-source/free (🔓), some are paid (💰), and all have dedicated n8n integrations with which you can build workflow automation.
Without further ado, let’s dive into it!
Here is our list of the best DevSecOps tools
- MISP (Malware Information Sharing Platform)
- TheHive
- Cortex
- SIGNL4
- Rundeck
- PagerDuty
- Sentry.io
- ServiceNow
- SecurityScorecard
- Microsoft Graph Security API
- Elastic Security
- Grafana
- Splunk
DevOps vs SecOps vs DevSecOps
While DevOps (Development Operations) aims to make software deployment and maintenance faster and more efficient, SecOps (Security Operations) aims to establish and strengthen software and network security.
Traditionally, development and security teams would work separately and come together only in the later stages of the SDLC (software development lifecycle). This separation of concerns means that security was often left as an afterthought, making it more difficult to integrate security recommendations into the end product.
DevSecOps emerged as a solution to unify these two methodologies in order to make the SDLC more efficient.
What are DevSecOps tools?
DevSecOps tools are designed to help integrate security into the DevOps process, enabling teams to automate security testing and ensure that security is a key component of the entire software development lifecycle. These tools can be broken down into several categories based on their purpose:
- Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) tools: These tools are used to automate the building, testing, and deployment of code. DevSecOps teams use CI/CD tools to ensure that code is thoroughly tested for security vulnerabilities before it's deployed.
2. Vulnerability scanners: These tools are used to scan code, infrastructure, and applications for vulnerabilities. DevSecOps teams use vulnerability scanners to identify and remediate security issues before they become a problem.
3. Threat modeling tools: These tools help developers and security teams identify potential threats to an application or system, allowing them to build security controls in the design and development process.
4. Security information and event management (SIEM) tools: These tools provide real-time monitoring of security events, allowing teams to detect and respond to threats in a timely manner.
5. Security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) tools: These tools help automate and streamline security incident response workflows, allowing teams to respond more quickly and effectively to security incidents.
13 best DevSecOps tools
There are many DevSecOps tools available for each of the above-mentioned categories. We're here to help you choose the right ones for your needs, whether that's a general-purpose service or a task-specialized app.
We’ll also take it one step further and show how n8n, a workflow automation tool, can be integrated with various DevSecOps tools to automate processes and streamline workflows!
Threat modeling tools for DevSecOps
Threat modeling tools help you identify security threats to a system or patterns in vulnerabilities, evaluate their severity, and pinpoint remediation methods. Then, based on the insights that these tools can offer, you can make informed decisions about the course of action: what vulnerabilities to patch, what security threats to prioritize, and how to diminish their impact.
MISP (Malware Information Sharing Platform)
Open-source/free 🔓
MISP (Malware Information Sharing Platform) is an open-source threat intelligence platform. It shares, stores, and correlates Indicators of Compromise (IoC) of targeted attacks, threat intelligence, financial fraud or vulnerability information.
If you need to automatically manage points such as attributes, events, feed, and warning lists, use the MISP node in your n8n workflows.
TheHive
Open-source/free 🔓
TheHive is a scalable open-source and free security incident response platform designed to help information security practitioners and bring security incident response to the masses. You can synchronize TheHive with one or multiple MISP instances to investigate MISP events, or export an investigation's results as a MISP event to help detect and react to attacks.
The TheHive node allows you to manage alerts, cases, logs, observables, and tasks. For example, you can use this node to build a workflow for zero dollar detection and response orchestration.
Cortex
Open-source/free 🔓
Cortex offers a powerful observable (e.g. URL, file, IP) analysis mechanism, with which you can analyze collected observables, respond to threats, and interact with the constituency and other teams. Cortex can also be used in conjunction with TheHive to analyze tens to hundreds of observables.
The Cortex node allows you to execute analyzers and responders, and get job details and reports. For example, you can use it to build a workflow that analyzes a URL and gets job details.
Alerting tools for DevSecOps
Security incidents can occur at every stage of software development, due to internal mishaps or external threats. Whatever the case, it's critical to become aware of potential security vulnerabilities as soon as they arise. Tools that automatically issue alerts when a threat or vulnerability is detected can help your team investigate and fix it as soon as possible, thus minimizing the critical mean time to respond (MTTR).
SIGNL4
Paid 💰
SIGNL4 is a plug-and-play cloud solution produced by Derdack. It automatically notifies teams on their mobile devices in case of critical events.
The SIGNL4 node allows you to send and resolve alerts. For example, you can build workflows that automatically store database alerts in Notion or monitor files changes and send alerts.
Rundeck
Open-source/free 🔓
Rundeck is an open-source runbook automation tool for incident management, business continuity, and self-service operations. This tool is typically used in security and compliance, helping organizations maintain compliance controls, control access to sensitive data, and audit activity logs.
Use the Rundeck node to automatically execute jobs and get their metadata.
PagerDuty
Open-source/free 🔓
Rundeck is actually created by PagerDuty, a cloud computing company that produces a SaaS incident response platform for IT departments.
The PagerDuty node allows you to manage incidents and incident notes, log entries, and users. For example, you can use it in a workflow that automates every step of an incident response playbook.
Monitoring tools for DevSecOps
Security monitoring is the automated process of collecting and analyzing indicators of potential security threats, then triaging these threats with the appropriate action.
Sentry.io
Paid 💰
Sentry.io is a service that helps you monitor and fix crashes in real-time, so that you can diagnose and optimize code performance.
The Sentry.io node allows you to manage information about events, issues, projects, and releases.
ServiceNow
Paid 💰
ServiceNow is a cloud computing platform to help companies manage digital workflows for their operations.
The ServiceNow node allows you to manage, among others, incidents, business services, and user roles.
SecurityScorecard
Paid 💰
SecurityScorecard has been named a 2021 Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice for IT Vendor Risk Management (VRM) Tools. The tool enables organizations to prove and maintain compliance with leading regulations and standards mandates that include PCI, NIST, SOX, and GDPR. Industries, as varied as Government, Insurance, Tech, or Retail, can use SecurityScorecard. Common uses cases include scanning attack surfaces, managing third-party risks, and staying in compliance.
The SecurityScorecard node allows you to manage data about the company, industry, portfolio, and reports, among others.
Microsoft Graph Security API
Paid 💰
The Microsoft Graph Security API allows connecting to Microsoft security products, services, and partners to streamline security operations and improve threat protection, detection, and response capabilities.
With the Microsoft Graph Security node you can manage your secure score and control profile.
Visualization tools for DevSecOps
An image is more compelling than raw numbers. When it comes to security, this can mean the difference between being aware of all issues and ready to take informed actions, or having to dive into disparate data to figure out what's going on. DevSecOps visualization tools provide an overview of the key metrics related to security incidents via customizable dashboards, that can serve as visual CTAs for your team.
Elastic Security
Paid 💰
Elastic Security helps security teams prevent, detect, and respond to threats quickly and at a cloud scale.
The Elastic Security node allows you to automatically manage cases and comments, add or remove tags, and create connectors. You can supplement the n8n workflows with Elastic Security dashboards that give you a visual breakdown of the alerts.
Grafana
Open-source/free 🔓
Grafana is a multi-platform open-source analytics and interactive visualization web application that provides charts, graphs, and alerts for the web when connected to supported data sources.
Use the Grafana node to manage your dashboards, teams, and users.
Splunk
Paid 💰
Splunk is a service for searching, monitoring, and analyzing machine-generated data via a Web-style interface. It indexes and correlates information in a container that makes it searchable, and makes it possible to generate alerts, reports, and visualizations.
The Splunk node allows you to manage fired alerts, users, as well as search configurations, jobs, and results. Similarly to Elastic Security, you can visualize critical incidents and activities in Splunk dashboards.
Start your DevSecOps automation with n8n!
n8n is a workflow automation tool that can be integrated with various DevSecOps tools to automate processes and streamline workflows. Here are some steps to use n8n with DevSecOps tools:
- Identify the DevSecOps tools that you want to integrate with n8n. Some common tools include GitLab, Jenkins, GitHub, AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.
- Install or sign up for n8n.The easiest way to get started is to download the desktop app, or sign up for a free n8n cloud trial. Thanks to n8n’s fair-code license, you can also self-host n8n for free.
- Start creating a workflow in n8n. A workflow is a series of nodes that perform specific actions. For example, you can create a workflow to send TheHive alerts using SIGNL4.
- Add more relevant nodes to your workflow if needed. n8n has a library of pre-built integrations for various DevSecOps tools that you can use. If a node does not exist for the tool you want to use, you can create a custom node using the n8n API.
- Configure the nodes in your workflow. You will need to provide credentials and other relevant information to connect n8n with your DevSecOps tools.
- Test your workflow to ensure that it is working correctly. You can use the n8n workflow editor to test individual nodes and the entire workflow.
- Deploy your workflow to a production environment. You can use the n8n CLI or Docker to deploy your workflow.
- Monitor your workflow to ensure that it is running correctly. You can also set up another ‘Error Workflow’ for your n8n workflows. When your workflow runs into an error, the error workflow is triggered.
Overall, using n8n with DevSecOps tools can help you automate repetitive tasks, reduce errors, and improve the efficiency of your DevSecOps processes.
What’s next?
Once getting started with DevSecOps automation in n8n, you might want to check out some inspiring examples of what you could build:
- learn to build an automated incident reporting workflow for factories with n8n
- minimize the damage caused by IT incidents by following an incident response playbook with PagerDuty, Jira, and Mattermost
- look for more DevSecOps automation workflows.
What's your DevSecOps process and what tools do you use? Join the discussion in our community forum.
