What? HN is suddenly the be-all and end-all of security announcements? I heard of the issue way before the release of the patch. Anyone that subscribes to announcements from Drupal has heard of the issue.
You say that 5 days isn't enough? What period of time is? A week? A month? A year? You can always find people who somehow miss the announcement.
> It's trivial to find out what a patch affects but it's not necessarily easy to find out what the issue is unless the patch actually addresses the specific bug.
It is trivial Take the recent POODLE attack for example. The rumors floating around points to it being an issue in SSL 3 and not TLS 1.0. That contained enough information for someone to preempt the actual announcement with the exact attack.
> Nov 1st: Story about scale of hacks hits mainstream media.
Who the hell cares about the mainstream media when monitoring issues related to software you administer? That's just negligence.