InfoSecBulletin Cybersecurity for mankind
The Linux Foundation said on Thursday that they are starting a new project to fix flaws in open source software (OSS) more effectively. Akrites sets up a shared Security Incident Response Team (SIRT) to work together on finding, fixing, and sharing OSS security problems.
If it sounds familiar, it should. Less than two weeks ago, Chainguard announced Athena, a coalition of over two dozen fintech and technology organizations aimed at addressing OSS bugs before public disclosure.
Anthropic unveils “OSS Scanner” Free AI Vulnerability Scanner for Open-Source Projects
Rise on RCE Exploits Targeting Hikvision Camera Flaw
FortiBleed Attack Compromised 80,000+ Devices, SonicWall Patches 4 SMA1000 Flaws CVSS 10
Critical Atlassian & IBM Flaws Expose Files and Enable Remote Code Execution
Citrix NetScaler SAML 0-Day Flaw Under Attack
Major Danish university breached, 200,000 users at risk
Microsoft’s X account hijacked to promote Clippy crypto scam
Critical cPanel, GitLab AI Gateway and Dell CSM Flaws Enable RCE And Admin Hijacking
Nearly 100,000 email addresses exposed in first AI-related data breach in Singapore
Hackers Exploit Zimbra Mail Servers: TeamViewer patched 5 critical flaws
Chainguard said it would team up with the Linux Foundation on a SIRT. They pointed out that more AI in cyberattacks is making it harder to share info and fix problems quickly.
The Linux Foundation’s new announcement does not talk about Athena, but Akrites does the same thing: it provides tools and ways to report, check, and fix OSS problems before they are publicly shared.
Akrites has help from many companies like Anthropic, AWS, Chainguard, Cisco, Citi, Endor Labs, Ericsson, Google, IBM, JPMorganChase, Microsoft, GitHub, NVIDIA, OpenAI, RapidFort, Red Hat, Rust Foundation, Sonatype, Vodafone, and Zscaler. Many of these are also part of Athena.
Seed money for Akrites comes from the Linux Foundation’s Alpha-Omega fund. Other groups provide engineering help and more money.
Akrites will create a trusted partner for reporting flaws. This will stop many scattered reports. They will also help key systems fix issues before they get attacked.
“When patches are released to the public, adversaries are able to utilize AI to rapidly reverse engineer the underlying vulnerabilities, develop exploits, and launch attacks. The success of our efforts, therefore, will be measured in patch deployment, not publication,” the Linux Foundation said.
Akrites was made to keep things private, to stop bad actors from creating weapons from weaknesses before fixes are ready, and to help as a final option, making sure that updates can still be given for software that is not supported anymore.
