Bugtraq is an electronic mailing list dedicated to issues about computer security. On-topic issues are new discussions about vulnerabilities, vendor security-related announcements, methods of exploitation, and how to fix them. It is a high-volume mailing list, and almost all new vulnerabilities are discussed there.
Bugtraq was created on November 5, 1993 by Scott Chasin in response to the perceived failings of the existing Internet security infrastructure of the time, particularly CERT. Bugtraq's policy was to publish vulnerabilities, regardless of vendor response, as part of the full disclosure movement of vulnerability disclosure.
Elias Levy, also known as Aleph One (alluding to the cardinal number aleph one), noted in an interview that "the environment at that time was such that vendors weren't making any patches. So the focus was on how to fix software that companies weren't fixing."
The mailing list was unmoderated originally, but the signal-to-noise ratio eventually became unacceptably bad. Moderation began on June 5, 1995. Elias Levy moderated the list from June 14, 1996 until he stepped down on October 15, 2001. David Mirza Ahmad, one of the many co-authors of Hack Proofing Your Network, Second Edition, took over from Levy and continued until he stepped down on February 23, 2006. David McKinney, a DeepSight threat analyst at Symantec, took over from Ahmad and is the current moderator.
Bugtraq was originally hosted at Crimelab.com. It was moved to the Brown University NetSpace Project — which has since been reorganized as the NetSpace Foundation — on June 5, 1995, the same day that its moderation began. In July 1999 it became the property of SecurityFocus and was moved there. SecurityFocus was acquired in full by Symantec on August 6, 2002.