They likely never worked with container images. Or had to inspect a Kubernetes YAML file at 3 AM. In today’s complex, ephemeral IT environments, knowing yourself - i.e. knowing what’s inside your containers - canchallenge the most ancient philosophical wisdom.

Containing container risk

Let’s face it: Containerization is the best thing since sliced bread. There’s a certain poetry to containers:immutable infrastructure, predictable environments, and unprecedented control. They deliver agility,portability, and consistency. Deploying and managing them is as easy as, well - eating sliced bread. They make your supply chain lean, your assets self-sufficient, and your mind at peace.

Yet, for all its advantages, the elephant in the room - a nimble elephant, but nonetheless an elephant-sized problem - is security. Few innovations have delivered so much convenience with such brazen disregard for security hygiene. Containerization has delivered new attack surfaces, cluster sprawl, and perhaps worse of all, the perception that “isolated and stand-alone” means "more secure”, and that "portable and lightweight"means “less risky”.

DevSecOps as central to DevOps

From hardcoded credentials to misconfigured clusters silently exposing your backend to the world, container security cannot be treated as a point solution to a point problem. It needs to become a strategic organizational imperative. Security teams need to go beyond merely keeping the lights on. Security can no longer be treated as a side quest - it’s the main campaign. Container security needs to be built-in  at every layer of your containerized applications from day one. This is a cultural shift as much as a technical one.

Security teams often lack visibility, bandwidth, and tooling that fits into workflows without sabotaging developer velocity. They are expected to secure containers when new CVEs appear faster than they can contain old ones.

This guide outlines 7 common container security pitfalls that keep seasoned DevOps leaders and CISOs up at night. Each comes with its own solution - best suited for its specific conditions, grounded in current best practices, guided by industry data and suited both for the “security breach virgins”, as well as the dark humor of seasoned professionals who’ve been in the trenches too long to cry anymore.