Security advisories & CVEs: how do you stay informed in a timely manner?

Hello everyone,

I would like to raise a topic that became very relevant for us last week: security advisories and timely information about security‑relevant updates in Zammad.

I had a regular update planned for last Tuesday to install my custom made package to enable HVE for ticket notifications. On the same day, our office received a PEC email.

For clarity: A PEC (Posta Elettronica Certificata) is an Italian legally certified email system, comparable to a registered letter with return receipt. It is commonly used by public authorities for formal and security‑relevant communications.

The PEC was sent by CSIRT Italia - Agenzia per la Cybersicurezza Nazionale (ACN)
The message concerned current cybersecurity risks about Zammad 6.5.x which was installed at the time, this of course immediately shifted our priorities.

I had already tested the upgrade to Zammad 7.0 weeks before in a test environment and he production update was planned for summer, not immediately.

What caught my attention afterwards was the following:
I only noticed the relevant forum post about the security advisory by chance on Tuesday morning, a few hours before receiving the PEC, although at that time it had already been published around 6 days earlier.

My questions to the Zammad team and the community:

Which official channels does the Zammad team recommend to stay reliably and promptly informed about critical security advisories and CVEs?

  • Newsletter?
  • GitHub Security Advisories?
  • RSS feeds?
  • Other channels?

What is considered best practice from your experience to avoid learning about security topics “by chance”?

How do other organizations handle this?

  • Monitoring CVE databases?
  • Automated alerts?
  • Dedicated security mailing lists?

Especially in environments where updates are planned, tested, and bound to change windows, early and reliable security information is crucial.

I would really appreciate recommendations from both the Zammad team and other community members.

Best,
Skip

Hi Skip,

Thanks for raising this question.

We recommend following GitHub Security Advisories Security Advisories · zammad/zammad · GitHub. This is our main channel for publishing security advisories and fixes, and you can subscribe to receive notifications.

For broader updates on Zammad (like major and minor releases, feature news, or events), our newsletters, forum posts in the announcement section, and social media (Mastodon, X, LinkedIn, FB) are helpful additional sources.

Best,
Julia

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There’s also an RSS feed for our releases which might be helpful.

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