alt Hacker News> In the end, it makes little difference if your organization lost all its high value data due to an insecure external codebase or an insecure internal codebase. The effects are the same, devastating! However, the probabilities of occurrence can be quite different.
But there is a good chance it will matter for you!
How many people do you think got fired for the Log4J RCE for using the library. How many people got fired for the Heartbleed vulnerability for using OpenSSL?
What would have happened if you had written those vulnerabilities yourself?
Also, if you have the same vulnerabilities as everyone else, the news coverage is diluted.
Replies
> How many people do you think got fired for the Log4J RCE for using the library
Seriously no idea, how many do you think?
> What would have happened if you had written those vulnerabilities yourself?
Hopefully nothing. After all, if the all the open source eyeballs on those products weren't enough to stop those bugs, then surely it's unreasonable to punish your own developers for not doing better. Yes, there's value in using common resources and certainly benefits from those other eyeballs. But this sort of "hiding in the herd" is also why we still have organizations implementing mandatory password rotations. As a society we really need to do a better job distinguishing from "theoretically preventable" and "negligently broken" and stop punishing people (or threatening to punish them) for "theoretically preventable" issues.
>How many people do you think got fired for the Log4J RCE for using the library.
The counter to that claim is that there are certainly a lot more insecure logging implementations in use that never get (widely) exploited mainly because of obscurity (i.e. closed-source).