The rise of bug bounties in recent years has created an incentive for hackers to hunt for vulnerabilities in a lot of software and services. But what about those software projects that can’t pay bounties, because they are developed by volunteers?
Thankfully, some researchers are devoting their time to such projects and to helping them find vulnerabilities before those with malign intents abuse them.
  
 
  Today, we publish a
  
   paper
  
  (also available as
  
   PDF
  
  ) by Andreas Lindh, a security researcher for
  
   Recurity Labs
  
  , who found a remote code execution vulnerability in
  
   Apache OpenMeetings
  
  , an open source software project for various kinds of collaborations.
 
  Andreas disclosed the vulnerability responsibly to the
  
   OpenMeetings
  
  developers, who swiftly patched the flaw, before the research was published. Hopefully others will learn from the mistakes made.
 
  This article was previously published on
  
   Andreas’s blog
  
  , where he has also published other responsibly disclosed vulnerabilities in
  
   open source projects
  
  , including one in
  
   Apache Jetspeed
  
  
   earlier this month
  
  
   .
  
 
  
 
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