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Aurornisyesterday at 7:39 PM1 replyview on HN

In my experience, it comes down to project management and organizational structure problems.

Companies hire a "security team" and put them behind the security@ email, then decide they'll figure out how to handle issues later.

When an issue comes in, the security team tries to forward the security issue to the team that owns the project so it can be fixed. This is where complicated org charts and difficult incentive structures can get in the way.

Determining which team actually owns the code containing the bug can be very hard, depending on the company. Many security team people I've worked with were smart, but not software developers by trade. So they start trying to navigate the org chart to figure out who can even fix the issue. This can take weeks of dead-ends and "I'm busy until Tuesday next week at 3:30PM, let's schedule a meeting then" delays.

Even when you find the right team, it can be difficult to get them to schedule the fix. In companies where roadmaps are planned 3 quarters in advance, everyone is focused on their KPIs and other acronyms, and bonuses are paid out according to your ticket velocity and on-time delivery stats (despite PMs telling you they're not), getting a team to pick up the bug and work on it is hard. Again, it can become a wall of "Our next 3 sprints are already full with urgent work from VP so-and-so, but we'll see if we can fit it in after that"

Then legal wants to be involved, too. So before you even respond to reports you have to flag the corporate counsel, who is already busy and doesn't want to hear it right now.

So half or more of the job of the security team becomes navigating corporate bureaucracy and slicing through all of the incentive structures to inject this urgent priority somewhere.

Smart companies recognize this problem and will empower security teams to prioritize urgent things. This can cause another problem where less-than-great security teams start wielding their power to force everyone to work on not-urgent issues that get spammed to the security@ email all day long demanding bug bounties, which burns everyone out. Good security teams will use good judgment, though.


Replies

srrdevyesterday at 9:19 PM

Oh man this is so true. In this sort of org, getting something fixed out-of-band takes a huge political effort (even a critical issue like having your client database exposed to the world).

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