Ford won’t work? There were a lot of comments about “paying vulnerability fixers only when they are in the break room“. I’ll say right away that the post was a joke. Staff motivation is too delicate a topic to give serious recommendations. 🙂

But I will sort out the objections:

🔻 IT staff will sabotage the vulnerability detection process by tweaking host configs. So that the scanner will produce only green reports. But IT staff can do this at any time, and we need to take this into account. 🤷‍♂️

🔻 IT staff will simply turn off hosts. If they can do this without harming the business, that’s great. 👍 And if this will break the production environment, then let them deal with their IT management. 😏

🔻 There is an opinion that the method is good, but only 2% of vulnerabilities used in attack chains need to be fixed. I traditionally DO NOT agree with the possibility of reliably separating these mythical 2% of vulnerabilities. Everything needs to be fixed. 😉

На русском

Vulnerability Remediation using the “Ford Method”. There is a popular story in the Russian segment of the Internet. Allegedly, an experiment was carried out at Henry Ford’s plant: conveyor repair workers were paid only for the time they were in the break room. And as soon as the conveyor stopped 🚨 and the repair workers went to fix it, they stopped getting paid. Therefore, they did their work quickly and efficiently, so that they could quickly (and for a long time) return to the break room and start earning money again. 👷‍♂️🪙

I did not find any reliable evidence of this. 🤷‍♂️

But what if the specialists responsible for vulnerability remediation were paid only for the time when vulnerabilities are not detected on their hosts. 🤔 This can have a very positive impact on the speed and quality of remediation. Unsolvable problems will quickly become solvable, and automation of testing and deployment of updates will develop at the fastest pace. 😏

На русском