Spencer Pearlman, Security Researcher at Detectify, presented A Hacker’s Approach to Finding Security Bugs in Open Source Software in a partnered webinar with friends at Debricked. Securing modern web applications takes new approaches, and this includes looking at it from a hacker’s perspective. Here are highlights from the presentation on how tech teams can apply the same hacker mindset to discover vulnerabilities in open-source software in their tech stack.

Many of the third-party components we find in audits have been pulled in their entirety from public software repositories (with GitHub being the most popular these days). But with some frequency we also come across snippets—lines of code that have been copied and pasted into source code. They might be a piece of a GitHub project, but they may also have been taken from a blog site like Stack Overflow or CodeGuru.