Today, on January 13, 2022, the White House is set to meet up with representatives of Apple, Google, Amazon, Meta, and IBM to talk about software security. Back in 2021, the US experienced multiple major cyberattacks, which is one of the main reasons behind this meeting.
The National Security Advisor of the White House, Jake Sullivan, sent out a letter to executives of the companies mentioned above in December 2021. All of this was because of a recently discovered “security vulnerability in open-source software called Log4j that organizations around the world use to log data in their applications.”
More precisely, the logging vulnerability was called Log4Shell. It was discovered on—believe it or not—Minecraft hosting sites and gave cybercriminals the ability to directly put code inside the library. Thankfully, Microsoft quickly managed to fix the exploit, even though it still wasn’t completely safe.
The White House has come out with a statement that the meeting will be hosted by deputy national security advisor for cyber and emerging technology, Anne Neuberger. The main objective of this gathering will be to discuss how secure open-source software is and what can be done to improve that security.
Reuters reports that the Biden administration has been taking cybersecurity as its top priority, following the cyberattacks mentioned at the beginning of this article. None of the big tech companies have come out with a statement before the meeting, but that might happen after it is finished.
We will update this article in case there is an official announcement from the likes of Google and Apple. It is not every day that all of these big powerful entities meet together in one room, so it is interesting to observe how this turns out.
