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Full Disclosure redux: under new management

Starting with a clean slate

Seclists.org convenor Gordon Lyon (also author and maintainer of Nmap) has decided that the Full Disclosure list is too important a resource to let slide away into history, and has announced that he'll relaunch it.

As http://www.theregister.com/2014/03/19/full_disclosure_closes/ reported last week, Full Disclosure's John Cartwright reached the end of his tether after twelve years operating the list he co-founded with Len Rose in 2002.

Lyon, whose handle Fyodor will be familiar to denizens of security lists, believes that the combination of Twitter and Pastebin still doesn't compare to running a mailing list: “Mailing lists create a much more permanent record and their decentralized nature makes them harder to censor or quietly alter in the future”, he writes at Insecure.org, citing this post by Attrition's Jericho, who elaborates on the value of mailing lists:

“Pastebin dumps are routinely removed. Researcher blogs, even hosted on free services such as WordPress and Blogger, disappear routinely. Worse, vendors that host advisories in their own products will sometimes remove their own historical advisories. The “Tweet + link” method simply does not cut it unless you want vulnerability provenance to vanish in large amounts.”

Fyodor says the revived Full Disclosure will remain lightly-moderated and vendor-neutral, and he emphasises that the list won't tolerate “vendor legal intimidation and censorship attempts”.

The new list is, however, rebuilding its membership database (El Reg wonders whether this is partly to eliminate the troll that broke Cartwright's heart) from scratch. ®

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