SpreadFirefox Security Breached (again)

Kurt writes "The hugely popular SpreadFirefox project, a Firefox community marketing site, has recently fallen victim to a security breach in their TWiki software. This breach has forced the site to shutdown until October 19th. During this time, they will be performing a rebuild of the SpreadFirefox system, to hopefully curb more security breaches."

Comments

hm

[sexyrexy]

OSS isn't inherently any more secure than proprietary software. It's just that the nature of the typical OSS developer vs a corporation means that the OSS organization is more transparent when bad things do happen. It doesn't mean that the security breach didn't already happen, though.

Re:hm

[ArsenneLupin]

the OSS organization is more transparent when bad things do happen

That's correct. OSS organizations already warn their public if something might have happened to their website.

Commercial organizations, on the other hand, don't warn their public. There may even be entire herds of goats trampling all over their website, and the public still isn't warned. Instead they quietely chase away the goats, still without a word of explanation to the public. And then completely forget to mend the fence through which the goats entered!

Re:hm

[ajs318]

OSS is inherently more secure than proprietary software.

Proprietary software authors do not have to do things "properly", they just kludge things together that may or may not work in every possible weirdy case, and rely on nobody ever seeing what an awful job they made of it in the first place. Witness any open source project that used to be closed-source {Mozilla; OpenOffice.org; Solaris}. Open Source developers have to write code that they would not be ashamed to show to anybody, because they do not know who is going to be looking at it. To quote Larry Wall, "Hubris is the quality that makes you write (and maintain) programs that other people won't want to say bad things about. Hence, the third great virtue of a programmer." They also have to write code in such a way that it won't be obvious from inspecting it how to misuse it.

Morbid curiosity is what makes people look at source code; and there are significantly more good guys than bad, so if anyone is looking at your source code, the chances are that their intentions are honourable.