Sen. Cotton urges top White House cyber official to protect open-source software

Sen. Tom Cotton urged the National Cyber Director to address open-source software vulnerabilities after reporting that foreign adversaries — including actors linked to China, Russia, and North Korea — have tried to insert backdoors into widely used OSS (citing an attempted backdoor in XZ Utils and a Russia-based maintainer embedded in DoD packages); the piece highlights supply-chain risk to U.S. government and defense systems and notes DoD direction to avoid procuring software/hardware susceptible to adversarial influence.