How A Clash Of Cultures Changed Software Security Forever

Forbes

31-07-2025

Chris Wysopal is Founder and Chief Security Evangelist at Veracode.
In 1998, I found myself in an unexpected place: testifying before the U.S. Senate about computer security alongside my fellow L0pht members. We weren't executives or policymakers—we were hackers. But our message was clear: something had to change. Software was being shipped with critical vulnerabilities, and no one was being held accountable.
We got to the Senate floor because we made noise. We did full disclosure. We forced uncomfortable conversations. We weren't seeking notoriety; we were advocating for a safer digital world.
Back then, responsible disclosure was ad hoc and adversarial. The tools we built and the research we published were often seen as threats rather than contributions. But we believed that exposing systemic flaws was the only way to compel progress. That mindset of transparency as a driver of accountability feels more relevant than ever.
Today's threat landscape is shaped by AI, automation and hyperconnectivity. Just as we once exposed buffer overflows and insecure protocols, today's researchers are surfacing flaws in machine learning models, hallucinated code and autonomous agents. The same principle applies: visibility must precede security. You can't fix what you can't see.
Leaders need to prepare for vulnerability discovery at machine speed. Create pathways to disclose flaws uncovered by AI systems, whether in third-party code or your own models. Build red-teaming capabilities for your AI stack, and design systems that reward (not resist) the signals surfaced by independent researchers.
At first, L0pht operated outside the system because the system wouldn't listen. But over time, things changed. We sat down with Microsoft in the late 1990s to explain our intent. We weren't trying to embarrass anyone. We just believed users deserved to know when protocols were insecure. That conversation led to coordinated disclosure policies and, later, acknowledgment of researchers in vendor advisories.
The lesson we learned—that collaboration beats confrontation—should guide leaders today. Security isn't just a technical function; it's a human one. And culture determines whether people share what they know.
CISOs should create internal equivalents of coordinated disclosure. Your engineers, product managers and legal teams must feel empowered to raise issues, even when they're inconvenient. Normalize the flow of uncomfortable truths. Adopt a blameless disclosure culture. And externally, build partnerships with the open-source community, independent researchers and other vendors that make collaboration frictionless and high-trust.
Our philosophy at L0pht was 'hack everything.' The goal was never just to break things, but to understand them. Security, to us, wasn't about checking boxes. It was about gaining a deeper grasp of how systems worked so we could make them safer.
That approach shaped the work we did when we joined @stake in 2000 and, later, consulted with Microsoft to help secure products such as Internet Explorer 6. Our team introduced methodologies like threat modeling, fuzzing and runtime attack surface analysis that became foundational to Microsoft's Security Development Lifecycle.
Today, the pressure to move fast is orders of magnitude greater than it was back in our L0pht days. Leaders are constantly balancing innovation with compliance and risk mitigation, but the real opportunity lies in embedding security into the innovation process itself.
Partner with engineering early in the development cycle. Build threat modeling into product design. View security not as a bottleneck but as a catalyst for better code and more resilient systems. The faster you move, the earlier security needs to be involved, because it's far more expensive and disruptive to fix things after the fact.
At its core, L0pht wasn't just a lab or a company. It was a culture. We shared tools, ideas and research openly because we believed in democratizing knowledge. That spirit helped seed today's bug bounty programs, open-source security tooling and responsible disclosure norms.
As AI reshapes development, security and infrastructure, leaders need to cultivate a similar culture of curiosity and principled dissent. Hire for grit and creativity, not just credentials. Promote the quiet truth-tellers. Build psychological safety so people feel safe flagging issues even when it's politically risky.
Security today isn't just about firewalls and encryption; it's about culture. And the most resilient organizations are the ones where people feel empowered to speak up, challenge assumptions and think like attackers, because they want to protect what matters.
It's easy to forget how radical it once was for a vendor to listen to a hacker. But that's the shift we helped drive in the early 2000s: from antagonism to collaboration—from underground to boardroom.
Today, security researchers have a seat at the table, but the lessons of the past still apply. Vulnerabilities don't get fixed because we wish them away. They get fixed because someone insists that they can't be ignored.
That insistence, combined with collaboration, transparency and a willingness to embrace uncomfortable truths, is what made the difference then. It's what still makes the difference now.
Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?