I am not an engineer. I’m a director of human resources. I don’t work in a technical space, but the concept of open source is fascinating to me as it applies to organizational culture. A company like Gravitational that has intentionally chosen open source as a foundation for our work makes not only a technical decision, but a cultural one. We’re finding that employees and candidates care deeply and appreciate our choice. Open source is a big deal for us.
For the majority of people in the information security world, the act of offensive hacking is something they are tasked with protecting against but have little ability to do themselves. That is like asking a professional boxer to enter the ring without knowing how to throw a punch. Sure, you may be able to get in and last a few rounds, but eventually, a formidable opponent will wear you down and knock you out.
Open Source projects can be a great asset, or they can be a curse – it’s all in how you manage it. To be successful in using open source, there are several things to keep in mind, from licensing to updates. And if you ignore any of them, it can cause problems. Here are some things to consider.
When Gronk the caveperson chipped out the first wheel from a slab of granite only to watch it roll away down a hill at some speed, he discovered we could build things to make our lives easier. We took this idea and ran with it, and now we have internet connected shoes. However, we also have cybercrime, data theft, phishing, scams, ransomware... the list goes on.
Nothing gets the AppSec / InfoSec community abuzz quite like a good old 0-day vulnerability. I mean, what’s not to love here? These vulnerabilities involve the thrill of adversaries knowing something we don’t, giving them a path to sail through our defenses to break into that sweet data inside. They are the James Bond of the security space — suave, sexy, and deadly.
Developers the world over depend on the Apache Struts open source framework to build valuable and powerful applications. This open source component and the Apache Software Foundation that stands behind it have provided organizations with a cost-effective force multiplier that allows their teams to develop faster and more efficiently. A very active project, GitHub shows Apache Struts as having 5,441 commits and 112 releases.
