Securing Open Source

by Brent Kirkpatrick

(Date Published: 12/13/2017.)

To secure your infrastructure, secure open source.

As hackers become more sophisticated, open source comes increasingly under attack. Worms target routers and servers while automated attacks target subnetworks. Business leaders need to support developers who work to secure open source.

Open source, the backbone of our Internet infrastructure, needs continual security development. Developers are needed to take a vulnerability through to a patch. Excellent developers are needed.

As new security challenges appear, the community needs to identify the vulnerability that is exploited and produce a patch. First intrusion must be detected. Then, the exploited vulnerability identified. Only after that can the vulnerability be debugged to find the lines of code responsible for the intrusion. This is an expensive process involving expert developers.

Many business leaders have the false impression that open source as a ''free'' resource costing only as much as the IT personnel that administrate it. Open source Internet infrastructure must continue being developed so it can face modern security challenges.

Secure open source. Secure your network.

defendIT (TM). AI-driven security measures derived from security incident data.