Write better code, urges Jen Easterly. And while you're at it, give crime gangs horrible names like 'Evil Ferret'

Software suppliers who ship buggy, insecure code are the true baddies in the cyber crime story, Jen Easterly, boss of the US government’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, has argued.

“The truth is: Technology vendors are the characters who are building problems” into their products, which then “open the doors for villains to attack their victims,” declared Easterly during a Wednesday keynote address at Mandiant’s mWise conference.

Easterly also implored the audience to stop “glamorizing” crime gangs with fancy poetic names. How about “Scrawny Nuisance” or “Evil Ferret,” Easterly suggested.

Even calling security holes “software vulnerabilities” is too lenient, she added. This phrase “really diffuses responsibility. We should call them ‘product defects,’” Easterly said. And instead of automatically blaming victims for failing to patch their products quickly enough, “why don’t we ask: Why does software require so many urgent patches? The truth is: We need to demand more of technology vendors.”

  • lemmyngEnglish
    9·
    10 hours ago

    That seems like a myopic view. Service misconfiguration is not always a vendor’s fault, and demanding software vendors to patch their products is not going to fix OSS vulnerabilities. In fact, we’ve seen examples this year of increased pressure to fix “issues” leading to developers unwittingly accepting malicious commits.

    Mind you, I’m not contesting that some vendors produce dogshit products (looking at you, CrowdStrike), but calling all vendors villains is a bit of a stretch.

    • Telorand@reddthat.comEnglish
      4·
      9 hours ago

      I’m not sure I fully agree with you, partly because she’s not talking about OSS alone. Let’s look at a recent but important example.

      Yubikeys manufactured before firmware version 5.7 (before May 2024), are vulnerable to a specific type of attack that is not novel, due to a faulty IC via its code. It’s something that should have been caught during QA. Who is to blame?

      Yubikey didn’t make the faulty IC, so obviously the IC maker should bear at least a good chunk of it, but I think it’s Yubikey’s responsibility to verify their work, especially since they’re the ones making the ultimate promise of cryptographic suitability that businesses and governments rely upon.

      I don’t know if it’s right to call companies like this “villains,” but I think “lazy or lax” might be appropriate. Additionally, I like the idea of calling cybercrime groups funny names.