It just became public that a custom built Linux kernel for embedded devices has been shipped and installed in production with a root debug backdoor open to anyone, see here for the announcement and for example here for some more details.

Besides the gravity of this particular incident and the difficulty of remediating it (I expect that many devices shipped with this kernel will never be updated) a couple of considerations come to my mind:

• first of all the need for IT Security Awareness and Education starting from everybody working in IT : anybody can make a mistake or even a blunder, but there should be safety nets proportional to the risks and IT professional should always be aware of the “security” consequences of what they do;

• the process of “bringing into production” IT products (aka Change Management) should be improved: as of today most of the time the really important test of an IT product is the final User Acceptance Test, which means that it is only important that the features requested by the final users work as expected. But this is not enough, and it is not like this in many other industries, think for example of televisions, refrigerators, cars etc. they all need to pass safety tests and be labelled accordingly otherwise they cannot be sold on the market. Why is it not like this also for IT products? As of today it is difficult to think of security standards, tests and labels common to all IT products, but it should be possible to agree on and adopt some common IT security baseline.