Will admission policies and signing slow my team down?

Not if you design for automation. In this case, we added ~92 seconds p95 to builds and 0 seconds to deploy time. The key is to treat signatures and SBOMs as artifacts produced by CI and verified by the cluster—no manual approvals.

Do I need to rebuild my entire stack to get these benefits?

No. Start with SBOM generation and image signing in CI, then add admission verification in one cluster/namespace. Roll out `NetworkPolicy` defaults and pre-commit secret scanning in parallel. You can phase this in over 2–4 sprints.

What about AI-generated code and dependency drift?

Shift-left rules (`Semgrep`, `CodeQL`) catch common AI-introduced issues. Pair that with `Renovate`/`Dependabot`, SBOM deltas, and policy that blocks risky updates in sensitive services. Automation lets you accept safe changes quickly and quarantine the rest.

How does this help with PCI and audits?

Auditors accepted signed SBOMs, admission logs, and CI logs as evidence for software integrity and change control. It reduced audit prep by ~60% because the “paper trail” is generated automatically on every change.

Case-studies · Oct 22, 2025 · 10 minute read

The Friday Night Supply‑Chain Attack We Didn’t Ship

How a payments platform avoided a seven‑figure breach by baking security into dev, not bolting it on later.

Alex Mercer

Principal Consultant, GitPlumbers

20 years fixing broken delivery pipelines and high-stakes outages at fintechs, marketplaces, and SaaS unicorns. Former SRE lead at a public payments company; still carries a pager (by choice).

“We didn’t slow down shipping. We slowed down attackers.” — CTO, anonymized fintech client

Back to all posts

The Friday Night Supply‑Chain Attack We Didn’t Ship

Key takeaways

Implementation checklist