FireEye Tries to Bury Keynote Reporting That It Ran Apache As Root On Security Servers

An anonymous reader writes: Leading network security company FireEye, which has customers in government and the Fortune 500 list, has caused a controversy at a London security conference today after its legal attempts to stop a keynote speech detailing the repair of major security loopholes in its customer-facing systems this year. Reported among these now-fixed vulnerabilities were the running of a significant number of FireEye's Apache-based security servers as 'root' — meaning that any attacker able to compromise the servers would have had absolute power over all its operations and commercial connections.

Comments

Re:What?

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

Why is 'root' in quotes? Why is it defined (poorly) as if it were this mysterious thing giving absolute power over "commercial" connections

Well, as "regular users" and "technically oriented" people we may not require "definitions" but "no-technical people" (aka "ordinary end users") may require "things" be more "spelled out" so they "understand" that the word is a "technical term". heh

Re:What?

[satch89450]

It's proper writing style to enclose text like user names and passwords in some sort of quotation mark in formal writing. I do it all the time in magazine articles, white papers, and technical documentation.