Unsafe at any speed? Jeff Williams of Aspect Security makes a sobering observation that rings very true.
Darkreading.com:
A typical, midsized financial organization has a portfolio of over a thousand applications. The largest firms exceed ten thousand applications. Each of these applications, on average, has hundreds of thousands of lines of custom code, and the largest can have over ten million lines. In addition, each application also includes anywhere from dozens to hundreds of software libraries, frameworks, and components that typically total over ten times the size of the custom code. And this portfolio is growing rapidly -- over 20% of these applications have new and updated code each year.
By comparison, consider the US Federal Tax Code, which has also grown dramatically over the years. Currently, the tax code totals just 4.4 million lines of “code” – roughly equivalent to just a handful of applications. As a security researcher I’ve discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in code. But as a former CEO, I’ve also analyzed a ton of legal contracts for loopholes. What’s interesting is that whether I’m scrutinizing software code or reviewing legal language, the analysis is not as different as you might think. Both require a detailed understanding of specialized language and a solid understanding of the underlying business.
So after two decades of high speed coding, a typical large financial organization has a pile of code as large as 2,000 copies of the entire 73,954 pages in the US Federal Tax Code -- almost 10 billion lines of code. (read full article)
posted by: gqjournal
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