Doors are open

Are you in control?

Imagine you work for a large software company.
Imagine you are a software developer in a project,
which frequently produces release updates to software which is constantly up and running at user desktops. The project is sufficiently large to make you just one number of hundreds of other developers.

Imagine you can deliver ready-built binaries into this project which are directly added into the next release image rather than being built from source. In fact, it would not even matter, if they were built from source, since in a large project, one purposedly well designed malicous, but innocent looking source code line is enough to make a security hole, which would remain uncatched in reviews - should there even be thorough source code reviews.

Imagine you are working in a project for the most popular messengers or for any of the free internet call projects. Imagine "someone" has made you an offer, or that you are in a desperate need of big money, for which you just made a good plan. Imagine millions of users every day, online around the globe. A million dollars? ten million dollars for one code line, which could be purposedly made malicous, yet would look a normal mistake and "normal" security hole.

Now, imagine you are the end user of that software. While this software is running, you conduct your daily online bank transactions, pages show your credit card number, your personal ID, your address, what you have bought and from where, how much you have on your account.. or..your you have confidential, personal, most intimate data in your computer. Or in the worst case, your computer and your user account would have access to company-confidential data. Do you still want to be "online" all the time?

Having freeware sw running online at your desktop is very much like having an electric outdoor lock which would be connected to the internet and which would frequently automatically update itself with the newest version. It was a free lock after all, so all the sofware is free. The binaries you receive, would not tell you anything, except that a change has happened. A change from unknown, to larger unknown.

Your computer is no different from your door lock.
Your firewall and virus protection sw are the locks of your computer against illegal guests from the internet. However, if you volunteerly open another door to come in, all locks at the other doors become meaningless in less than a nanosecond.

Have you thought about it? Think again.
-NWQ