FOSSPicks
FOSSPicks
Nate explores the top FOSS tools, including the latest KDE desktop, an ASCII art creator, a nostalgic homage to Quake, and the very latest secure browsers.
Open Dangers
As 2025 dawned, I was surprised to see an email in my inbox entitled "The Overlooked Risks of Open Source Software in Industrial Security" from a popular cybersecurity platform. The thrust of the argument was that open source adoption was dangerous due to bad actors potentially contributing malicious code.
Of course, I understand that proprietary software developers need to sell their products. Still, given the public scrutiny to which popular FOSS is subjected, it's unlikely that a version containing malicious code would go undetected for long. There's also nothing stopping companies from hiring developers to vet and customize open source code to their needs. Going closed source is certainly no guarantee of safety. At DEF CON 32, researcher Moritz Abrell recently revealed major flaws in an industrial remote-access gateway supposedly renowned for its security.
Of course, Microsoft engineer Andres Freund also discovered a back door in the open source xz utility last year. Still, it took around three years for bad actor "Jia Tan" to work himself into a position of trust and make obfuscated changes to the code. While Abrell hasn't revealed the time it took him to run a similar exploit on proprietary systems, it's safe to say he was able to do so considerably faster.
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