Industry CMO on the Downstream Risks of "Logo Disclosures"

Jennifer Leggio, chief marketing officer at Flashpoint, is an executive with more than a decade's experience in managing corporate cyber security marketing at the highest levels -- much of the time seeking and advocating a greater ethical stance in marketing. At last month's Hack in the Box Conference in Amsterdam, she delivered a keynote presentation entitled, 'A Risk Assessment of Logo Disclosures'.

The basic premise is that failures in the coordinated approach to vulnerability disclosures can seem attractive from an initial marketing perspective, but are damaging to both the industry and its users. The ultimate problem comes from the different missions between security product development and sales teams: the first is purposed to reduce harm, while the latter is purposed to sell product.

In between these teams sit the researchers, whose function is to find weaknesses in security products so that they can be strengthened, and their users better protected. Researchers wish to have their expertise acknowledged, while developers wish to fix their products securely. Between them they have evolved the process known as coordinated disclosure: researchers report their findings to the developer who fixes the faults, and both coordinate simultaneous disclosure of the vulnerability and its fix.