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Security Researchers Warn a Widely Used Open Source Tool Poses a 'Persistent' Risk to the US


The open source software easyjson is used by the US government and American companies. But its ties to Russia’s VK, whose CEO has been sanctioned, have researchers sounding the alarm.

Now cybersecurity researchers are warning that a widely used piece of open source code —which is linked to Kiriyenko’s company and managed by Russian developers—may pose a “persistent” national security risk to the United States. “You have this really critical package that’s basically a linchpin for the cloud native ecosystem, that’s maintained by a group of individuals based in Moscow belonging to an organization that has this suspicious history,” says Hayden Smith, a cofounder at Hunted Labs. Open source technology allows anyone to see and modify code, helping to make improvements, detect security vulnerabilities, and apply independent scrutiny that’s absent from the closed tech of corporate giants.

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