The Stack Overflow podcast is a weekly conversation about working in software development, learning to code, and the art and culture of computer programming. Hosted by Paul Ford and Ben Popper, the series features questions from our community, interviews with fascinating guests, and hot takes on what’s happening in tech. Founded in 2008, Stack Overflow is empowering the world to develop technology through collective knowledge. It’s best known for being the largest, most trusted online community for developers and technologists. More than 100 million people come to Stack Overflow every month to ask questions, help solve coding problems, and develop new skills.
What security teams need to understand about developers
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Stack Overflow user Cecil Curry earned a Populist badge with their exceptionally thoughtful answer to In Python how can one tell if a module comes from a C extension?.
Some great excerpts from this episode:
“From the program side, I would say if you're running a security program or you're starting from day one, there's a danger with security people and being the security person who's out of touch or doesn't know what the life of a developer is like. And you don't want to be that person. And that's not how you have actual business impact, right? So you got to embed with teams, threat model, and then do some preventative security testing, right? Testing things before it gets into production, not just relying on having a bug bounty program.”
“With code scanning, you're looking for potentially insecure patterns in the code, but with dynamic testing, you're actually testing the live application. So we're sending HTTP traffic to the application, sending malicious payloads in forms or in query parameters, et cetera, to try to elicit a response or to send something to an attacker controlled server. And so using this, we're able to. Not just have theoretical vulnerabilities, but exploitable vulnerabilities. I mean, how many times have you looked at something in GitHub security alerts and thought, yeah, that's not real. That's not exploitable. Right. So we're trying to avoid that and have higher quality touch points with developers. So when they look at something, they say, okay, that's exploitable. You showed me how. And you traced it back to code.”