And if you ingest patches in seconds, you now have an issue of checking that the patch is not poisonous. Many a modern outage comes from changes deployed too fast. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
if a CVE drops at 23pm, attackers have at least 8 hours before someone in the office has a possibility to take a look at it. nowadays, that seems to be plenty.
I think "good security/engineering practices" still has a chance.
Things like--
* Minimizing attack surfaces by not running lots of software on the same server and not bloating feature sets beyond the minimum
* Limiting access so that most things can't be done by most users, there are *no* super-users, and escalating access is temporary ans requires multiple accounts to authorize
* Encrypting data at rest
All software has flaws and it's now easier than ever to find and exploit them, but this disproportionately hurts people who were only putting on a show of security and relying on a single layer or two of defense instead of developing a robust insider threat model (which helps with both insider threats and threats that get inside) and defense in depth.
Have on-call sysadmins or have them work in a three-shift schedule. That way there's always someone there to fix stuff as it happens, including deploying security patches or worst case taking affected systems offline until they can be patched
This used to be common before devops and cloud took over. Looks like it might make a comeback. Maybe with a new fancier job title
There's a really simple solution that people will hate: server goes offline at night.
I've seen this a few times, and it's pretty annoying as a user, but ultimately it's not that bad usually. If you are ordering something at 3am, the physical shipment still occurs during daylight hours. Many banking operations are not actually instantaneous, they settle in a batch job overnight.
And this doesn't have to be binary. Providing a read-only interface provides lots of value while having a reduced attack surface.
When seconds matter, it is impossible to patch if you haven't patched already. If you need to patch, or attempt to contain against an adversary who is prepared and sophisticated enough to succeed within minutes, you've already lost. Defenders need to win every time. Offense only needs to win once.
And if you ingest patches in seconds, you now have an issue of checking that the patch is not poisonous. Many a modern outage comes from changes deployed too fast. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
if a CVE drops at 23pm, attackers have at least 8 hours before someone in the office has a possibility to take a look at it. nowadays, that seems to be plenty.
i don't have a solution.
I think "good security/engineering practices" still has a chance.
Things like--
All software has flaws and it's now easier than ever to find and exploit them, but this disproportionately hurts people who were only putting on a show of security and relying on a single layer or two of defense instead of developing a robust insider threat model (which helps with both insider threats and threats that get inside) and defense in depth.
6 replies →
Have on-call sysadmins or have them work in a three-shift schedule. That way there's always someone there to fix stuff as it happens, including deploying security patches or worst case taking affected systems offline until they can be patched
This used to be common before devops and cloud took over. Looks like it might make a comeback. Maybe with a new fancier job title
A published CVE is kind of late in the game even.
There's a really simple solution that people will hate: server goes offline at night.
I've seen this a few times, and it's pretty annoying as a user, but ultimately it's not that bad usually. If you are ordering something at 3am, the physical shipment still occurs during daylight hours. Many banking operations are not actually instantaneous, they settle in a batch job overnight.
And this doesn't have to be binary. Providing a read-only interface provides lots of value while having a reduced attack surface.
2 replies →
People are gonna hate this but: we’ll need agents ready and waiting to autonomously patch and deploy instantly
4 replies →
low attack surface applications is the future.
23 pm is what, 11:00 am?
23 pm where? Simple answer is distributed teams.
2 replies →
I think Apple still hasn't patched the broken root certificate on macOS cli tooling, right?
It has been days now.
When seconds matter, it is impossible to patch if you haven't patched already. If you need to patch, or attempt to contain against an adversary who is prepared and sophisticated enough to succeed within minutes, you've already lost. Defenders need to win every time. Offense only needs to win once.
Citation:
Binance hot wallet signed 50 EIP-7702 delegations 3 minutes before the drain - https://808bits.com/articles/binance-hot-wallet-eip-7702-del... - October 30th, 2026
[dead]