5.ShakingHands Esm W900

The tech industry is readying solutions to the security risks posed by the collaborative software that underpins modern-day computing — but aid from Washington could be essential to the project’s success.

The cyber community’s scramble to address major vulnerabilities in the widely used code library Log4j is just the latest wake-up call about the security risks of the open-source software ecosystem — and it’s fueling new calls for more government support in plugging those gaps.

The discovery of the Log4j flaw early this month spawned immediate alarm throughout the cyber world because of the enormous number of internet-connected systems it exposed to potential attacks. CISA estimated that “hundreds of millions” of devices run software that uses the Java-language logging tool.