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Orange chain links running across a blue digital numbers board.

Paper promises don’t patch supply chain vulnerabilities

  • Article Published January 28, 2026

This article originally appeared on SC Media on January 28, 2026.

By Daniel Bardenstein

Washington has spent years trying to improve federal software supply chain security with a familiar tool: paperwork. The instinct was right. After major supply chain shocks, the federal government wanted to push responsibility upstream—toward the companies that build and ship software—rather than leaving every agency, system owner, and taxpayer to absorb the cost of insecure defaults. That’s the backbone of Secure by Design: the industry should build security into products, not bolt them on after deployment.

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