Celebrity Vulnerabilities: Effective Response to Critical Production Threats

Log4Shell, Spring4Shell, are you tired of being told to drop everything and respond to the next critical vulnerability in an open-source package? Chances are, if you work in the engineering team of any software development organization, the answer is yes. You’ve probably had to pause other projects and throw hours of engineering effort into finding and replacing vulnerable versions of these packages in production code. Open Source Security isn’t a new concept, but it has had many notable moments in the media extending back for over decade. So how do we respond effectively to these "celebrity vulnerabilities" without causing upheaval in our development pipelines and operations? 

In this session, Alyssa Miller dives into the lessons learned from three major open source security events, the Equifax breach via Struts, the Log4j vulnerabilities and the Spring4Shell exploit. She’ll use these situations as pseudo case-studies to discuss how security, engineering, and operations teams can streamline a response that allow us to prioritize and execute a response without creating a fire fight each time a new flaw is discovered in a popular package. She will shed light on what approaches have failed organizations in the past and while her solution won’t stop new vulnerabilities from being discovered, it will highlight how we can make them less of a headache going forward.