.As software-intensive digital systems become an integral part of modern life, ensuring that these systems are developed to satisfy security and privacy requirements is an increasingly important societal concern. At the same time, professional software development depends on social interaction where developers inhabit communities, drawing on network communities online and co-located in their day-to-day work. This paper explores how these communities operate by studying interactions on Stack Overflow, and the kinds of influence the communities represent in terms of encouraging non-specialist developers to write secure code. Although there are indications that answers provided on Stack Overflow are not good, the reality is that developers will continue to use them. A different approach is to make sure that the information available is more appropriate.