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Sean Michael Kerner, writing for eSecurity Planet: Back in 1999, Eric Raymond coined the term "Linus' Law," which stipulates that given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow. Linus' Law, named in honor of Linux creator Linus Torvalds, has for nearly two decades been used by some as a doctrine to explain why open source software should have better security. In recent years, open source projects and code have experienced multiple security issues, but does that mean Linus' Law isn't valid?

According to Dirk Hohndel, VP and Chief Open Source Officer at VMware, Linus' Law still works, but there are larger software development issues that impact both open source as well as closed source code that are of equal or greater importance. "I think that in every development model, security is always a challenge," Hohndel said. Hohndel said developers are typically motivated by innovation and figuring out how to make something work, and security isn't always the priority that it should be. "I think security is not something we should think of as an open source versus closed source concept, but as an industry," Hohndel said.

Sean Michael Kerner, writing for eSecurity Planet: Back in 1999, Eric Raymond coined the term "Linus' Law," which stipulates that given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow. Linus' Law, named in honor of Linux creator Linus Torvalds, has for nearly two decades been used by some as a doctrine to explain why open source software should have better security. In recent years, open source projects and code have experienced multiple security issues, but does that mean Linus' Law isn't valid?

According to Dirk Hohndel, VP and Chief Open Source Officer at VMware, Linus' Law still works, but there are larger software development issues that impact both open source as well as closed source code that are of equal or greater importance. "I think that in every development model, security is always a challenge," Hohndel said. Hohndel said developers are typically motivated by innovation and figuring out how to make something work, and security isn't always the priority that it should be. "I think security is not something we should think of as an open source versus closed source concept, but as an industry," Hohndel said.

darthcamaro writes: There are lots of tools and different secure protocols that could be used by internet service providers to embed security into the fabric of the internet, making the internet secure by default, but that's not something that Facebook's Chief Security Officer, Alex Stamos wants to happen. Instead of security by default, his view is that carriers should be neutral and let malicious traffic do whatever it wants.

"I believe strongly in the end-to-end principle, I think we should have neutral carriers in the middle and it should not be the responsibility of ISPs to secure the internet," Stamos said in a press conference at the Black Hat USA conference last week.
Slashdot reader Darth Technoid disagrees, calling a lack of security "the Original Sin of the Internet," and speculating that Vint Cerf and Bob Metcalfe "thought that future technology would resolve the issues." What do other Slashdot readers think?

Should the internet be secure by default?

The RSA Conference "is perhaps the world's largest security event, but that doesn't mean that it's necessarily a secure event," reports eSecurityPlanet. Scanning the conference floor revealed rogue access points posing as known and trusted networks, according to security testing vendor Pwnie Express. storagedude writes: What's worse, several attendees fell for these dummy Wi-Fi services that spoof well-known brands like Starbucks. The company also found a number of access points using outdated WEP encryption. So much for security pros...
At least two people stayed connected to a rogue network for more than a day, according to the article, and Pownie Express is reminding these security pros that connecting to a rogue network means "the attacker has full control of all information going into and out of the device, and can deploy various tools to modify or monitor the victim's communication."

While the IT industry is making progress in securing information and communications systems from cyberattacks, a new survey from cybersecurity company CyberArk says several critical areas, such as privileged account security, third-party vendor access and cloud platforms are undermining them. An anonymous Slashdot reader shares with us the details of the report via eSecurity Planet: According to the results of a recent survey of 750 IT security decision makers worldwide, 40 percent of organizations store privileged and administrative passwords in a Word document or spreadsheet, while 28 percent use a shared server or USB stick. Still, the survey, sponsored by CyberArk and conducted by Vanson Bourne, also found that 55 percent of respondents said they have evolved processes for managing privileged accounts. Fully 79 percent of respondents said they have learned lessons from major cyberattacks and have taken appropriate action to improve security. Sixty-seven percent now believe their CEO and board of directors provide sound cybersecurity leadership, up from 57 percent in 2015. Three out of four IT decision makers now believe they can prevent attackers from breaking into their internal network, a huge increase from 44 percent in 2015 -- and 82 percent believe the security industry in general is making progress against cyberattackers. Still, 36 percent believe a cyberattacker is currently on their network or has been within the past 12 months, and 46 percent believe their organization was a victim of a ransomware attack over the past two years. And while 95 percent of organizations now have a cybersecurity emergency response plan, only 45 percent communicate and regularly test that plan with all IT staff. Sixty-eight percent of organizations cite losing customer data as one of their biggest concerns following a cyberattack, and 57 percent of organizations that store information in the cloud are not completely confident in their cloud provider's ability to protect their data.

jones_supa writes The record amount of security challenges in 2014 undermined the confidence many had in high quality of open source software. Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, addressed the issue head-on during last week's Linux Collaboration Summit. Zemlin quoted the oft-repeated Linus' law, which states that given enough eyes, all bugs are shallow. "In these cases the eyeballs weren't really looking", Zemlin said. "Modern software security is hard because modern software is very complex," he continued. Such complexity requires dedicated engineers, and thus the solution is to fund projects that need help. To date, the foundation's Core Infrastructure Initiative has helped out the NTP, OpenSSL and GnuPG projects, with more likely to come. The second key initiative is the Core Infrastructure Census, which aims to find the next Heartbleed before it occurs. The census is looking to find underfunded projects and those that may not have enough eyeballs looking at the code today."

New submitter poseur writes: If you're looking for an alternative to TrueCrypt, you could do worse than VeraCrypt, which adds iterations and corrects weaknesses in TrueCrypt's API, drivers and parameter checking. According to the article, "In technical terms, when a system partition is encrypted, TrueCrypt uses PBKDF2-RIPEMD160 with 1,000 iterations. For standard containers and other (i.e. non system) partitions, TrueCrypt uses at most 2,000 iterations. What Idrassi did was beef up the transformation process. VeraCrypt uses 327,661 iterations of the PBKDF2-RIPEMD160 algorithm for system partitions, and for standard containers and other partitions it uses 655,331 iterations of RIPEMD160 and 500,000 iterations of SHA-2 and Whirlpool, he said. While this makes VeraCrypt slightly slower at opening encrypted partitions, it makes the software a minimum of 10 and a maximum of about 300 times harder to brute force."

storagedude writes: Amid ongoing security concerns, the popular open source encryption program TrueCrypt may have found new life under a new name. Under the terms of the TrueCrypt license — which was a homemade open source license written by the authors themselves rather than a standard one — a forking of the code is allowed if references to TrueCrypt are removed from the code and the resulting application is not called TrueCrypt. Thus, CipherShed will be released under a standard open source license, with long-term ambitions to become a completely new product.

darthcamaro writes "Last week, Rain Forrest Puppy (aka Jeff Forristal) first disclosed the initial public report about an Android Master Key flaw. Code was released earlier this week for attackers to exploit the flaw — but what about users? Google has claimed that it has patched the issue but how do you know if your phone/carrier is safe? Forristal's company now has an app for that. But even if your phone is not patched, don't be too worried that risks are limited if you still to a 'safe' app store like Google Play. 'The only way an Android user can be attacked via this master key flaw is if they download a vulnerable application. "It all comes down to where you get your applications from," Forristal said.'"

darthcamaro writes "Oracle has been slammed a lot in recent months about its lackluster handling of Java security. Now Oracle is responding as strongly as it can with one of the largest Java security updates in history. 50 flaws in total with the vast majority carrying the highest-possible CVSS score of 10."

darthcamaro writes "On Monday of this week, the primary servers that kept those infected with the DNSChanger malware were taken offline. It's a story that sparked lots of media hype with people claiming that hundreds of thousands of people could lose their Internet access. As it turns out, major U.S. ISPs including Verizon, Cox, AT&T and CenturyLink all kept their own DNSChanger servers online, protecting any users from losing their access."

A number of readers have written in with stories related to today's permanent rollout of IPv6 by several major organizations. From the looks of it, for the 1% or so of end users with IPv6 support, everything is going smoothly. For those not so lucky to have IPv6 already, an anonymous reader writes with (mostly) good news: 60% of ISPs intend to enable IPv6 by the end of 2012. For business users, darthcamaro provides some words of caution: "...the Chief Security Officer of VeriSign doesn't think IPv6 should be turned on by a whole lot of people. The problem is network security devices in many cases don't scan IPv6. So if you turn IPv6 on, you're screwed. 'If you don't have that visibility into IPv6, you should probably consider explicitly disabling IPv6 on your systems until you can take a very concerted approach to enabling IPv6 in a secure manner,' McPherson said."

First time accepted submitter kongshem writes "According to Symantec's annual Internet Security Threat Report, religious and ideological websites have far more security threats per infected site than adult/pornographic sites. Why is that? Symantec's theory: 'We hypothesize that this is because pornographic Web site owners already make money from the Internet and, as a result, have a vested interested in keeping their sites malware-free — it's not good for repeat business,'"

darthcamaro writes "In any given year, Slashdot always has stories about how a researcher hacked a browser in only a few minutes at the Pwn2own hacking challenge. This year the rules are a bit different, and instead of hackers winning for just one vulnerability, the rules allow for multiple vulnerabilities to be presented. The winner isn't the first one to hack a browser, but is the one that can hack the browser the most. 'In the past, due to the way the competition was architected, we had lots of sensationalist headlines, things like "Mac hacked in three seconds,"' said Aaron Portnoy, Manager of the Security Research Team at HP TippingPoint. 'We don't think that type of sensationalism was representative of all the research that was going on.'"

darthcamaro writes "Linux users have long relied on iptables for in-distro firewall setup. The upcoming Fedora 15 release changes that and introduces us to new dynamic firewall technology. 'Most Linux systems use IP tables type firewalls and the problem is that if you want to make a change to the firewall, it's hard to modify on the fly without reloading the entire firewall,' Fedora Project Leader Jared Smith said. 'Fedora 15 is really the first mainstream operating system to have a dynamic firewall where you can add or change rules and keep the firewall up and responding while you're making changes.'"

An anonymous reader writes "HD Moore is at it again. This time the famous open source security researcher has set his sights on exploiting Apple iOS. The Metasploit 3.7 release includes 35 new attack modules in total."

darthcamaro writes "While SSL certs are widely used on the Internet today, a new study from Qualys, set to be officially released at Black Hat in July, is going to show some shocking statistics. Among the findings in the study is that only 3% of SSL certs in use were actually properly configured. Quoting: '"So we have about 22 million SSL servers with certificates that are completely invalid because they do not match the domain name on which they reside," Ivan Ristic, director of engineering at Qualys, said.'"

graychase writes "A major milestone is reached as the first major top-level domain (.org) is now secured with DNSSEC. The expense to .org for implementing DNSSEC on its infrastructure and operations has not been a small one. While specific figures as to the cost of DNSSEC implementation haven't been released, Afilias, which is the technical operator of the .org registry, told InternetNews.com in 2009 that the DNSSEC implementation would be a multi-million-dollar effort. The cost isn't going to be passed on by .org to domain registrars. The move toward securing the .org registry with DNS security started in September 2008, following the Kaminsky DNS flaw disclosure."

graychase writes "Homeland Security's cybersecurity director, Richard Marshall, warns that universities aren't turning out enough cybersecurity experts and urges greater scholarship funding. 'Look at all the great football and basketball programs. They're all on scholarships. They're not playing for fun — they're playing for money.'"

darthcamaro writes "America is no longer the spam king. According to Cisco, US-originated spam dropped by over two trillion messages — American-based IP addresses sent about 6.2 trillion spam messages. The new world leader is Brazil at 7.7 trillion messages. 'I'm not completely surprised to see US falling to number two in the spam stats, but I didn't expect it to happen yet,' said Cisco Fellow Patrick Peterson. 'I was really gratified to see the actual spam volume decrease, not just ranking, but we [also] decreased the amount of spam that is pouring out of the United States.'" The drop in US spam might have had something to do with the temporary shutdown of the McColo spam ISP.

An anonymous reader writes "A new virus is on the prowl that can infect your Windows XP/2K system and record every key you hit on your keyboard. The keys are then sent back to the virus creator where he/she can steal your passwords and credit card information. The virus named, Korgo, started showing up in the last week of May but it now has at least six different variants. To protect yourself from this nasty virus, Microsoft is urging all users to download the KB835732 Security Update. As with the Sasser worm, you'll get the Korgo virus without even knowing it. It does not arrive by email, but simply by being connected to a network or to the Internet without having a patched machine or a properly configured firewall."

cuzality writes "The media is now beginning to suggest that this recent onslaught of new viruses (with new versions of major-impact viruses being found daily) the result of a virus gang turf war, kinda like the India/Pakistan virus conflict, in which official Pakistani sites were savaged by such infamous groups as Indian Snakes and Indian Hackers Club. The gangs are shooting fast and loose: variations of the big ones are being discovered daily (as of March 4, we are up to MyDoom.H, Netsky.F, and Beagle.K), and in the space of three hours on Wednesday morning, five variants of these three were first discovered. Typically these viruses (or more correctly, worms) do little damage to the infected computer, intent mostly on spreading far and wide, and sometimes inflicting DoS on some poor evil empire."

Greedo writes "Seems like UltraDNS was hit with a denial of service attack this weekend. Since these are the guys who are supposed to be running the .ORG DNS, and in light of recent attacks on the gTLD roots, attacks against DNS servers should be treated very seriously. What kind of protection can be had? What happens when an attack like this brings down an entire TLD? Do you want to give control of an entire gTLD to one organization? Read a follow-up discussion on comp.protoocols.dns.std."