Full disclosure movement - Definition and Overview

Many hackers believe that posting working code taking advantage of vulnerabilities in a popular program or system will hasten the developers' release of an update or a patch to correct the issue. In some cases, a hacker or cracker may release an easy to use trojan or virus as a proof-of-concept.

It is considered good practice to give developers some time to fix problems and issue patches before full disclosure. This time is usually not very long, and it is rarely extendable. A few days to around a week is considered a good deadline in case of most simple problems (buffer overflows etc.); longer time is given if the problem is particularly deep.

Threat of full disclosure has proven to be a very good guarantee that developers will take care of problems in a timely manner.

See also Hacker, Hacker ethic.