full-disclosure - CERT, Full Disclosure, and Security By Obscurity

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From: gbayley at ausmac.net (Grant Bayley)
Subject: CERT, Full Disclosure, and Security By Obscurity

On Fri, 31 Jan 2003, Darren Reed wrote:

> In some mail from Grant Bayley, sie said:
> > Access Denied
> > ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> > This information is only accessible to authorised AusCERT members.
> > If you wish to access this document.	Please Login.
> >
> > It's just lucky the information was already out there.
> >
> > We have our own self-appointed ivory tower here in Australia.
> >
> > It is called AusCERT.
> > _______________________________________________
>
> Whatever you might think, AusCERT is like this because they get
> bugger all funding from the Government and so need to be able
> to provide their "members" with some sort of exclusive services
> that they can collect money for in order to pay for staff and
> facilities.
>
> Even when it was Government funded, they had bugger all in the
> way of (hardware) resources because it arose inside a Uni
>
> I suppose my advice here is do not think of AusCERT or treat
> them like an organisation that provides free service(s).

My comment was intended to illustrate that the "exclusive service" of
having access to the information on the ethernet padding problem isn't
even remotely "exclusive".  To me, this hints at the same sort of thing
that the original poster mentioned in relation to CERT in the US - that
they're little more than a place where people can pay to get vulnerability
information with some amount of analysis on top, and hence are "nothing
special" in a sea of other commercial organisations doing much the same.