Introducing Red Hat Technical Account Management Service for Product Security

For customers who want to step up their defenses against the next cyberattack wave or set of vulnerabilities, Red Hat is pleased to extend Technical Account Management (TAM) services by adding Technical Account Management Service for Product Security.

Many Red Hat customers are familiar with TAM services. TAMs offer deep technical knowledge in their areas of specialty and act as trusted customer technical advisors. They develop personal relationships with customers to proactively drive the best possible product experience. Red Hat TAMs also advocate for customers with Red Hat product managers, developers, other decision makers, and even upstream communities.

Red Hat Security TAMs focus holistically on security footprints across the Red Hat product portfolio. Responsibilities include:

• Share ad hoc education about various attack tactics
• Help customers use Red Hat security and compliance tools
• Suggest hardened configurations and/or deployments as appropriate
• Educate how Red Hat helps reduce risk and mitigate vulnerabilities
• Provide more accurate vulnerability analysis on Red Hat products
• Assist in triaging vulnerability scan reports
• Facilitate communication with customers, Red Hat teams, partners, other vendors, and the open source community as necessary
• Influence Red Hat product management, product security teams, partners, other vendors, and the open source community as needed by representing customer points of view
• Foster awareness about the software value chain
• Advise on potential mitigations in the face of major security incidents
• Help produce post-mortem security incident assessments

CVEs (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures)

In 1999, MITRE Corporation established the CVE concept as a standard for labeling security vulnerabilities. The IT industry quickly embraced CVE, and today, MITRE, Red Hat, and more than 400 other members participate in an organization named CVE.org. 

The most common member role within CVE.org is called CNA (CVE Numbering Authority). As of July 2025, Red Hat also holds 2 special CVE.org roles: Root and CNA-LR. A Root organization recruits and trains other member organizations. A CNA-LR (CVE Numbering Authority of Last Resort) settles disputes about presenting CVEs. Red Hat is the only private-sector organization to hold both of these roles. 

Red Hat works directly with security researchers and the CVE community to identify, validate, and patch vulnerabilities for Red Hat products. As a CNA, Red Hat quickly validates potential vulnerabilities, assigns CVE IDs, and prioritizes development efforts. Red Hat’s collaboration with researchers can also provide the company with access to information not yet public. This often allows engineering and product security groups to fix vulnerabilities before public disclosure, which decreases risk and exposure for customers. Red Hat employees contribute to many upstream open source projects, which provides a unique advantage to resolve vulnerabilities upstream, as well as in Red Hat products.

Red Hat Product Security also maintains human and machine-readable information repositories about CVEs that apply to Red Hat products. To access these repositories, see the overall Red Hat Product Security page and navigate to the area of interest. You can also directly access the machine-readable CVE information repository, or the human-readable CVE repository.

Security TAMs take advantage of Red Hat’s connections with the CVE program, and other connections within the security community, to give Red Hat customers the information they need to help defend against cyberattacks. The security community includes Red Hat Product Security teams, Red Hat engineering groups, Red Hat product managers, other vendors, the upstream development community, and like-minded customers.

Scenarios

When security audit scans call out thousands of alleged vulnerabilities, Red Hat Security TAMs help evaluate the results, eliminate false positives, and triage vulnerabilities. When customers need a Red Hat product patch or mitigation fast, Security TAMs can take advantage of their connections within the security community to find the best solution for their customers.

Many customer managers ask for credible assurances that they’re taking appropriate steps to protect their organizations from somebody plundering them over the internet. The stakes are high because the world depends on their organizations’ goods and services. Although nobody can offer total safety, Red Hat Security TAMs can help these customers simulate what-if scenarios, sometimes with other like-minded customers in conferences or appropriate forums. Such sharing could help everyone learn lessons from feedback instead of a post-mortem after suffering an attack.

This should help create, maintain, or restore confidence with Red Hat deployments.

Software supply chain attacks 

Supply chain attacks are the new definition for how bad “bad” can get.

In 2017, attackers injected the NotPetya malware into an update for a popular Ukrainian accounting program named M.E.Doc. When M.E.Doc users downloaded the next update, the embedded malware wiped out their systems. Global shipping giant, Maersk, operated a computer system inside Ukraine and downloaded a copy. The malware exploited Maersk topology weaknesses to spread across the globe. This attack shut Maersk down for weeks while trucks backed up for miles at Maersk shipping terminals because workers had no mechanism to determine what freight to load onto which ships. Around 20% of global shipping ground to a halt.

IT teams labored around the clock to recover thousands of computers, including all of Maersk’s Active Directory domain controllers. Many Maersk employees slept under their desks, unable to go home, until the crisis was over. If not for one offline Active Directory domain controller in Africa, the disaster could have been even worse. That domain controller hard drive was too large to copy over any network, so someone climbed on an airplane to physically bring it to London. Once there, teams recovered Maersk’s Active Directory infrastructure, allowing employees to log in and restore Maersk’s systems, so workers could load and unload ships again and unclog backed up shipping terminals. The NotPetya attack made headline news around the world.

In 2020, attackers penetrated SolarWinds and poisoned a software update. Many governments and Fortune 500 companies trust SolarWinds software to help manage their networks, so whenever any SolarWinds customer applied the latest update, they opened their networks to attackers. In 2025, victims are still assessing the damage. 

The open source community and Red Hat product teams are working on software lifecycle management standards to help customers verify that the software they use is uncompromised. Red Hat Security TAMs will help customers correctly configure and harden Red Hat software to minimize these sorts of attacks.

Peace of mind?

Nobody can credibly promise full immunity to attacks, because everyone operates on the cybersecurity front lines and anyone could become an unwitting attack vector. But Red Hat Security TAMs help reduce the odds and consequences of a successful attack, which may help ease customers’ fears. Contact your Red Hat account team to learn more. Or, if you’re unsure how to contact your Red Hat account team, just contact Red Hat.