The description above is MITRE’s definition of CWE-1104 in CWE 4.20, a base-level weakness.
Common consequences MITRE lists
- Other: Reduce Maintainability; Varies by Context
Guides on this site
Review dependency health without treating a score as a guarantee
Combine security practices, maintenance, licensing and product exposure into a recorded adoption or replacement decision.
Respond to an exploited or malicious dependency
When a dependency vulnerability is being exploited, or a package version is malicious, triage gives way to incident response: find every running copy, contain it, patch and redeploy, hunt for exploitation, rotate secrets and close on deployed evidence.
Triage new dependency vulnerability findings
Turn a weekly batch of Dependabot, OSV-Scanner or npm audit findings into a short list of distinct, shipped, reachable issues, each routed to one outcome: fix, not affected, accept or escalate.
Case study: Log4Shell (CVE-2021-44228)
How a JNDI lookup in Apache Log4j became internet-wide remote code execution, why transitive and shaded dependencies made it so hard to patch, which mitigations held, and what it teaches about dependency inventory and SBOMs.
Place each security control in the pipeline and decide what it blocks
Put secrets scanning, SAST, SCA, IaC and image scanning, DAST, fuzzing, attestation and admission control where each sees the right input, block only on findings a developer can act on, and deploy only images the pipeline has attested.
Stop dependency confusion and typosquatting at install time
Pin every internal package name to its real source, verify installed bytes against a lockfile, and delay or gate install scripts so a public look-alike cannot replace a private dependency.
Case study: the LastPass breach (2022)
How an attacker went from a compromised developer laptop to a DevOps engineer's home computer, the keys to LastPass's cloud backups and a copy of customer vaults; why each vault's safety then rested on its master password and PBKDF2 iteration count; and what it teaches about backup keys, privileged endpoints, KDF upgrades and unencrypted metadata.
Practice
- Repair a security pipeline for GitHub Actions and GitLab CI · Local project
References
This page is generated from MITRE’s CWE 4.20 catalogue (released 30 April 2026) and lists every guide, fix card and lab here that cites CWE-1104.
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