just as a note, its not as simple as firing off an email to linux-distros and calling it a day.
qualys, one of the big firms (10,000+ customers across 130 countries), has even taken a stance against emailing linux-distros because of the restrictions and policies involved:
> Although contacting the linux-distros list has been clearly beneficial
> (they have thoroughly reviewed and tested the patches, and were able to
> prepare their kernel updates beforehand), we have reached the conclusion
> that it has become increasingly difficult to coordinate the disclosure
> of kernel vulnerabilities with both groups (the Linux kernel security
> team and the linux-distros list), because they have very different
> policies. From now on, we will coordinate the disclosure of kernel
> vulnerabilities with the Linux kernel security team only. We also
> apologize in advance for this.It’s certainly a thing some people do. But there is not a unified consensus on how to handle vulnerabilities. Different security researchers (or, in fact, the same researchers releasing different findings) can and do take many different courses of action.