Mike Shaver, ten days, and expletives

Mike Shaver (Director of Ecosystem Development at Mozilla) handed his business card to Robert Hansen (RSnake) on Wednesday night at Black Hat. On it he wrote “ten f—ing days.” When I asked him about it, he said he meant to communicate to Robert that since Mozilla got a recent security update out in only ten days, that there was no reason for Robert to post details of vulnerabilities publicly before a patch was available. Since we’re among the most responsive software vendors, security researchers do not have to resort to full disclosure to get us to patch bugs quickly.

Well, whatever he meant, his statement has taken on a life of its own. Robert posted on his blog, and a bunch of news articles picked it up as a challenge.

This is the official Mozilla word: This is not our policy. We do not think security is a game, nor do we issue challenges or ultimatums. We are proud of our track record of quickly releasing critical security patches, often in days. We work hard to ship fixes as fast as possible because it keeps people safe. We hope these comments do not overshadow the tremendous efforts of the Mozilla community to keep the Internet secure.