New White House Announcement on the Vulnerability Equities Process

The White House has released a new version of the Vulnerabilities Equities Process VEP. This is the inter-agency process by which the US government decides whether to inform the software vendor of a vulnerability it finds, or keep it secret and use it to eavesdrop on or attack other systems. You...

White House Releases VEP Disclosure Rules

The U.S. government took steps toward offering more transparency into the Vulnerabilities Equities Process. On Wednesday it released of the “Vulnerabilities Equities Policy and Process” PDF charter that outlines how the government will disclose cyber security flaws and when it will keep them...

More on the Vulnerabilities Equities Process

Richard Ledgett -- a former Deputy Director of the NSA -- argues against the US government disclosing all vulnerabilities: Proponents argue that this would allow patches to be developed, which in turn would help ensure that networks are secure. On its face, this argument might seem to make sense ...

Trump's Top Cybersecurity Boss Talks Priorities

BOSTON–Citing Mirai and WannaCry as recent examples, Rob Joyce, special assistant to the president and cyber security coordinator for the White House, said the global landscape of cyber threats can’t be ignored and the U.S. needs to sharpen its defenses when it comes to fending off attacks. “If y...

ShadowBrokers' Windows Zero-Days Already Patched

Hours after what was thought to be a damaging release of NSA hacking tools for Windows systems, Microsoft quelled some anxiety with a late-night statement on Friday that most of the vulnerabilities disclosed by the ShadowBrokers had already been patched. The biggest surprise was that the most...

EFF Sues NSA, ODNI Over Zero-Day Disclosure Processes

The Electronic Frontier Foundation wants a peek behind the curtain of the government’s Vulnerabilities Equities Process. The advocacy group on Tuesday filed a Freedom of Information Act FOIA lawsuit against the National Security Agency and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence hopin...

Obama Lets NSA Use Zero-Day Exploits by labeling it as 'National Security Need'

On Saturday, the Senior Administration Officials cast light on the subject of Internet Security and said President Obama has clearly decided that whenever the U.S. Intelligence agency like NSA discovers major vulnerabilities, in most of the situations the agency should reveal them rather than...