Oracle's chief security officer is tired of customers performing their own security tests on Oracle software, and she's not going to take it anymore. That was the message of a post she made to her corporate blog on August 10—a post that has since been taken down.
Perhaps thinking that all the security researchers in the world were busy recovering from Black Hat and DEF CON and would be somehow more pliant to her earnest message, Mary Ann Davidson wrote a stern message to customers entitled "No, You Really Can't" (here in Google's web cache; it's also been reproduced on SecLists.org in the event that Oracle gets Google to remove the cached copy). Her message: stop scanning Oracle's code for vulnerabilities or we will come after you. "I’ve been writing a lot of letters to customers that start with 'hi, howzit, aloha'," Davidson wrote, "but end with 'please comply with your license agreement and stop reverse engineering our code, already.'"
Davidson scolded customers who performed their own security analyses of code, calling it reverse engineering and a violation of Oracle's software licensing. "Even if you want to have reasonable certainty that suppliers take reasonable care in how they build their products—and there is so much more to assurance than running a scanning tool—there are a lot of things a customer can do like, gosh, actually talking to suppliers about their assurance programs or checking certifications for products for which there are Good Housekeeping seals for (or “good code” seals) like Common Criteria certifications or FIPS-140 certifications." Davidson continued:
Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments