Dark Reading is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC
This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them.Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.
Who do you trust to find security issues? What kind of researcher is best at sniffing out vulnerabilities and gaps in security? Do you put your faith in the good guys working for security firms? Do the bad guys always come out on top when finding trouble? Or is the best solution someone who straddles the sometimes-fuzzy line between the two?
That's the question we put to the community here at SecurityNow, and the response was... interesting. It turns out that more than one-third of our readers, 35.1% to be precise, feel that "black hats" have done the most to advance the cause of security in our industry.
Some might feel that this is akin to saying that the Visigoths did the most to advance the cause of Roman civilization, but in a way it makes sense: Black hat hackers devote most of their time to finding vulnerabilities and tend to be rather good at their jobs.
The group getting the next highest number of responses was white hat hackers, given credit for the most advances by one fifth of those responding to the poll. These legitimate professional researchers, often employed by the companies that provide security hardware and software, are paid to do the same sort of work that black hats do, only without actually committing crimes as the point of the whole exercise.
The group getting the least respect was the cadre known as "grey hats," that is, those who use techniques that might be of questionable legality to do research that tends to be used for legitimate purposes. We don't know why these researchers who try to walk on both sides of the street get less respect, but they do; perhaps they would be better served by committing to one side or the other of the morality (and legality) fence.
What do you think? Have the criminal hackers actually performed a service by exposing security vulnerabilities? Should we be giving more credit to the legitimate, white hat researchers? Let us know, and get ready: Another SecurityNow.com poll question is coming soon!
— Curtis Franklin is the editor of SecurityNow.com. Follow him on Twitter @kg4gwa.
The 10 Most Impactful Types of Vulnerabilities for Enterprises TodayManaging system vulnerabilities is one of the old est - and most frustrating - security challenges that enterprise defenders face. Every software application and hardware device ships with intrinsic flaws - flaws that, if critical enough, attackers can exploit from anywhere in the world. It's crucial that defenders take stock of what areas of the tech stack have the most emerging, and critical, vulnerabilities they must manage. It's not just zero day vulnerabilities. Consider that CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog lists vulnerabilitlies in widely used applications that are "actively exploited," and most of them are flaws that were discovered several years ago and have been fixed. There are also emerging vulnerabilities in 5G networks, cloud infrastructure, Edge applications, and firmwares to consider.
Incident Readiness and Building Response Playbook
In this special report, learn the Xs and Os of any good security incident readiness and response playbook.
Tweet This
1 Comments
