If there’s one thing that can make the competitive tech industry band together, it’s security. Last month, the Heartbleed bug affected nearly everyone in the industry,requiring millions of customers to change their passwords and rethink the safety that their services provide them. The Wall Street Journal reports that several of the biggest tech firms on the planet are doing what they can to prevent the next Heartbleedby helping to pay the salaries of full-time employees and funding an audit for the OpenSSL Project.
Large tech companies appear to have learned one lesson from last month’s Heartbleed bug: they have to help fund Internet security. The Linux Foundation on Thursday said it will fund full-time salaries and a security audit for the OpenSSL Project, which manages the code for the most widely used set of online encryption tools. That money comes from donations by Google, Amazon.com, Dell, Facebook, IBM, and others. The audit will be conducted by Kenneth White and Matthew Green, two widely respected security researchers. Three other companies –Nokia, Huawei Technologies and Smartisan — have each pledged $50,000 a year directly to OpenSSL. The discovery last month of the Heartbleed bug raised awareness that a good chunk of Internet security relies on a few underfunded European coders and a retired military consultant in Maryland.
