Comment by woodruffw

Comment by woodruffw a day ago

Yep, that's definitely the assumption. However, I think it's also worth noting that zero-days, once disclosed, do typically receive advisories. Those advisories then (at least in Dependabot) bypass any cooldown controls, since the thinking is that a known vulnerability is more important to remediate than the open-ended risk of a compromised update.

> I'm sure the majority of bugs and vulnerabilities were never supply chain attacks: they were just ordinary bugs introduced unintentionally in the normal course of software development.

Yes, absolutely! The overwhelming majority of vulnerabilities stem from normal accidental bug introduction -- what makes these kinds of dependency compromises uniquely interesting is how immediately dangerous they are versus, say, a DoS somewhere in my network stack (where I'm not even sure it affects me).

mik3y 21 hours ago

Could a supply chain attacker simulate an advisory-remediating release somehow, i.e., abuse this feature to bypass cooldowns?

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ted_dunning 18 hours ago

Of course. They can simply wait to exploit their vulnerability. It it is well hidden, then it probably won't be noticed for a while and so you can wait until it is running on the majority of your target systems before exploiting it.
From their point of view it is a trade-off between volume of vulnerable targets, management impatience and even the time value of money. Time to market probably wins a lot of arguments that it shouldn't, but that is good news for real people.

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