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Comment by ang_cire | Hacker News Reader

As someone in security who doesn't work at a major place that get invited to the nice pre-notification notifications, I hate this practice.

My customers and business are not any less important or valuable than anyone else's, and I should not be left being potentially exploited, and my customers harmed, for 90 more days while the big guys get to patch their systems (thinking of e.g. Log4J, where Amazon, Meta, Google, and others were told privately how to fix their systems, before others were even though the fix was simple).

Likewise, as a customer I should get to know as soon as someone's software is found vulnerable, so I can then make the choice whether to continue to subject myself to the risk of continuing to use it until it gets patched.

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> My ... business are not any less ... valuable than anyone else's,

Plainly untrue. The reason they keep distribution minimal is to maximise the chance of keeping the vuln secret. Your business is plainly less valuable than google, than walmart, than godaddy, than BoA. Maybe you're some big cheese with a big reputation to keep, but seeing as you're feeling excluded, I guess these orgs have no more reason to trust you than they have to trust me, or hundreds of thousands of others who want to know. If they let you in, they'd let all the others in, and odds are greatly increased that now your customers are at risk from something one of these others has worked out, and either blabbed about or has themselves a reason to exploit it.

Similarly plainly, by disclosing to 100 major companies, they protect a vast breadth of consumers/customer-businesses of these major companies at a risk of 10,000,000/100 (or even less, given they may have more valuable reputation to keep). Changing that risk to 12,000,000/10,000 is, well, a risk they don't feel is worth taking.

> Your business is plainly less valuable than google, than walmart, than godaddy, than BoA.

The company I work for has a market cap roughly 5x that of goDaddy and we're responsible for network connected security systems that potentially control whether a person can physically access your home, school, or business. We were never notified of this until this HN thread.

If your BofA account gets hacked you lose money. If your GoDaddy account gets hacked you lose your domain. If Walmart gets hacked they lose... What money and have logistics issues for a while?

Thankfully my company's products have additional safeguards and this isn't a breach for us. But what if it was? Our customers can literally lose their lives if someone cracks the security and finds a way to remotely open all the locks in their home or business.

Don't tell me that some search engine profits or someone's emails history is "more valuable" than 2000 schoolchildren's lives.

How about you give copies of the keys to your apartment and a card containing your address to 50 random people on the streets and see if you still feel that having your Gmail account hacked is more valuable.

I think from an exposure point of view, I'm less likely to worry about the software side of my physical security being exploited that the actual hardware side.

None of the points you make are relevant since I have yet to see any software based entry product whose software security can be concidered more than lackluster at best, maybe your company is better since you didn't mention a name I can't say otherwise.

What I'm saying is your customers are more likely to have their doors physically broken than remotely opened by software and you are here on about life and death because of a vuln in xz?

If your companies market cap is as high as you say and they are as security aware as you say why aren't they employing security researchers and actively on the forefront of finding vulns and reporting them? That would get them an invite to the party.

Sorry, but that's not a serious risk analysis. The average person would be hurt a lot more by a godaddy breach by a state actor than by a breach of your service by a state actor.

Man if it was ever appropriate to tell someone to touch grass this would be it.

The think of the children part is a nice touch as well. 10/10 copypasta would repost.

> Your business is plainly less valuable than google, than walmart, than godaddy, than BoA.

Keep in mind it's the EROI not market cap.

A company is worth attacking if their reward:effort ratio is right. Smaller companies have a much lower effort required.

Being in a similar boat, I heartily agree.

But I don't want anyone else to get notified immediately because the odds that somebody will start exploiting people before a patch is available is pretty high. Since I can't have both, I will choose the 90 days for the project to get patches done and all the packagers to include them and make them available, so that by the time it's public knowledge I'm already patched.

I think this is a Tragedy of the Commons type of problem.

Caveat: This assume the vuln is found by a white hat. If it's being exploited already or is known to others, then I fully agree the disclosure time should be eliminated and it's BS for the big companies to get more time than us.

OpenSSL's "notification of an upcoming critical release" is public, not private.

You do get to know that the vulnerability exists quickly, and you could choose to stop using OpenSSL altogether (among other mitigations) once that email goes out.

if your system has already been compromised at the root level, it does not matter in the least bit

Well if you assume everyone has already been exploited, disclosing quickly vs slowly won't prevent that.

Also, if something is being actively exploited, usually there's no or very little embargo.

Yeah I worked in FAANG when we got the advance notice of a number of CVEs. Personally I think it's shady, I don't care how big Amazon or Google is, they shouldn't get special privileges because they are a large corporation.

I don't think the rationale is that they are a large corporation or have lots of money. It's that they have many, many, many more users that would be affected than most companies have.

I imagine they also have significant resources to contribute to dealing with breaches - eg, analysing past cookouts by the bad actor, designing mitigations, etc.

I empathize with this as I've been in the same boat, but all entities are not equal when performing triage.

> My customers and business are not any less important or valuable than anyone else's

Hate to break it to you but yes they are.

> My customers and business are not any less important or valuable than anyone else's

Of course they are. If Red Hat has a million times more customers than you do then they are collectively more valuable almost by definition.

If OP is managing something that is critical to life - think fire suppression controllers, or computers that are connected to medical equipment, I think it becomes very difficult to compare that against financial assets.

At a certain scale, "economic" systems become critical to life. Someone who has sufficiently compromised a systemically-important bank can do things that would result in riots breaking out on the street all over a country.

You could use the EPA dollar to life conversion ratio.

Though anything actually potentially lethal shouldn't really have a standard Internet connection. E.g. nuclear power plants, trains, planes controls, heavy industrial equipment, nuclear weapons...

Something that is critical to life should not be connected to Internet.

And yet it seems like every new car is.

Sshhh now you are starting to talk like a rightwinger. Alex Jones has been saying this for a long time ;)

Such systems should be airgapped…

In that case OP should not design systems were a sshd compromise can have a life-threatening impact. Just because it's easier for everything to be controlled from the cloud doesn't mean that others need to feel sympathy when that turnes out to be as bad of an idea as everyone else has said.

I can think of two approaches for such companies:

a. Use commercial OS vendors who will push out fixes.

b. Set up a Continuous Integration process where everything is open source and is built from the ground up, with some reliance on open source platforms such as distros.

One needs different types of competence and IT Operational readiness in each approach.

> b. Set up a Continuous Integration process where everything is open source and is built from the ground up, with some reliance on open source platforms such as distros.

How would that have prevented this backdoor?

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