Most security conversations center on four things: Scanners, vulnerabilities, alerts, and remediation. By the time these come into play, teams are already deep in the software lifecycle. Code has been written. Dependencies have been selected. Systems are up and running.
In other words, the most consequential security decision—which software to trust in the first place—has already been made.
Most modern software relies on a web of open source packages, frameworks, and libraries maintained by people outside your organization. Those dependencies often arrive through routine decisions that do not feel risky in the moment: a library that has been used before. A package recommended in a blog post. A dependency suggested by an AI coding assistant. A transitive dependency you did not even know you pulled in.
Individually, each of these choices seems small. Together, they establish the foundation on which your software is built. Once that foundation is set, changing it later is expensive, disruptive, and sometimes unrealistic. This is how risk enters your system long before most security tools ever see it.
When Does Software Security Actually Begin?
Because most security tools are focused on code after it’s already been written, teams invest in vulnerability scanners, CI/CD checks, runtime monitoring, and alerting. These tools are important, but none of them help with a much bigger issue that should have been addressed before a single code was written: whether a dependency is trustworthy enough to build on top of it.
Most teams do not stop to ask that directly. Not because they do not care, but because they do not have the context to answer the question with confidence and, until this point, there hasn’t been a reliable way to automate this process. Popularity metrics like star counts, download numbers, or project age become shortcuts for trust. They are easy to find and to justify, but they do not tell you who controls a project, how it is maintained, and whether that control has changed over time.
How AI and Speed Are Changing Dependency Decisions
AI-assisted development has expedited production. Consequently, dependencies are introduced faster, with less scrutiny, and sometimes without developers fully understanding what is being pulled into their projects.
Speed is valuable, but it can lead to bad dependency choices and, therefore, a high price to be paid later. Once a dependency is deeply integrated, it is much harder to undo. Replacing it is painful, and discovering hidden risk tends to happen too late.
How To Assess Dependency Risk Before Development Starts
DepsDiver focuses on pre-development intelligence. Instead of scanning your own software, it looks outward at the open source packages and repositories you are considering before they become embedded in your codebase – surfacing signals that are most often missed.
The platform can tell you:
- Who is actually maintaining a project
- How contributor patterns change over time
- Where development activity is concentrated
- Whether there are indicators of adversarial foreign control or influence
- Inherent risk that exists regardless of whether a vulnerability has been disclosed
This kind of analysis does not require an SBOM, local scanning, or setup inside your environment. It is built for investigation and early decision-making, including the moment someone asks whether a dependency is something they want to rely on long term.
What Happens After You Choose a Dependency
The mistake many teams make is treating dependency selection and vulnerability scanning as the same problem. They are not. One is about deciding what to trust. The other is about protecting what has already been built. Blurring those phases is why security so often feels reactive instead of intentional.
Once software is in development or production, security must remain part of the equation. Teams still need continuous visibility, monitoring, and detection across the code base actively powering your organization. That is where Entercept comes in. Entercept focuses on in-development and post-development security, providing ongoing protection for software that already exists.
A Better Way to Think About Dependency Risk
Software security really comes down to two decisions:
- What you are willing to build on top of
- How you protect what you have already built
DepsDiver exists for the first decision. Entercept exists for the second.
If you are evaluating new dependencies, experimenting with unfamiliar packages, or trying to understand risk before it becomes expensive and difficult to remove, the highest-leverage moment you have is before code is written.
Security does not start when the scanner runs. It starts when someone decides to add a dependency.
Start With DepsDiver
If you want to understand the risk of an open source package before it becomes part of your codebase, DepsDiver was built to meet this need.
You can use it to investigate repositories and dependencies without installing anything, without generating an SBOM, and without waiting for a vulnerability to surface.
Sign up for DepsDiver and run your first investigation today.
Pick a dependency you already use, or one you are considering adopting, and see what is actually behind it.
