**StepSecurity** is a cybersecurity firm focused on one of software's most overlooked soft spots: the CI/CD pipeline. Best known for its Harden-Runner security agent and open-source tooling for GitHub Actions, the company helps developers detect malicious behavior inside build systems—precisely where modern supply-chain attacks begin. As dependency ecosystems like npm and PyPI face escalating compromise, StepSecurity's niche has shifted from nice-to-have to mission-critical. The company's relevance is underscored by a bruising wave of 2025 incidents its research community has helped illuminate: the **TanStack compromise**, where 84 malicious package versions across 42 packages were pushed out through a cache-poisoning chain and stolen OIDC tokens; malicious **Axios** releases published via a hijacked maintainer account; tainted **Red Hat Cloud Services** npm packages; and a backdoor slipped into **LiteLLM**, a widely used AI gateway. The common thread—exfiltrated CI credentials and compromised workflow tokens—is exactly the attack surface StepSecurity monitors and hardens. For engineering leaders, the takeaway is actionable: pin dependencies, rotate credentials, adopt OIDC-based publishing, and instrument pipelines with runtime detection. As software supply chains grow more tangled, StepSecurity sits at the center of a market that can only expand.