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Comment by cluckindan

4 days ago

If this was in the US, all financial institutions need to audit their code to comply with NIST SP 800-53.

If they haven’t, it would be ethically dubious for you to not report it.

5 comments

cluckindan

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jacquesm  4 days ago

In theory there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is.

> If they haven’t, it would be ethically dubious for you to not report it.

I can report all I want, someone needs to act on that report for it to have an effect.

There are people out there who think that some static analysis tool plugged into their CI/CD pipeline is the equivalent of a code audit.

  • cluckindan  4 days ago

    But the aforementioned NIST standard requires a lot more from auditing and operations.

    • jacquesm  4 days ago

      I know what the standard requires. I also know what happens in practice and typically the auditors are understaffed, overworked and their technical expertise is lower than it should be. As a result a lot of stuff slips through the cracks.

      What does get flagged though is not getting employee permission for putting photos on the 'team' page. It's good they flag that. I'd rather they also went in much deeper on tech issues.

      I've reviewed 270 companies to date. I have yet to find a single one that had audited the source code they imported. It's not untypical to find an installation that automatically updates a whole raft of dependencies during the build phase. And absolutely nobody looks at that code until something breaks.

drw85  4 days ago

In my experience, most devs and companies don't consider the dependencies they load 'their' code. They only look at the code they write, not everything they deploy.