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What? It takes vigilance, training, competence, and a culture of security. Oh, and lots and lots of money backing it up. If your company isn't willing to make t

What? It takes vigilance, training, competence, and a culture of security. Oh, and lots and lots of money backing it up. If your company isn't willing to make that commitment, then your company shouldn't legally be allowed to handle any sensitive data at all. I have personally breached companies that fit this description. That was my job, and it's why I was hopefully the last person to breach that particular facet of their landscape. But pentests can't catch everything. That's the dirty secret that is also somehow not a secret. The very next commit could make that pentest obsolete. Ditto for spinning up a server. As if we haven't already lost? The Equifiax leak is a privacy disaster of the highest order. Well, what do you think will happen from this? That may be true, yet the world will go on. We've been trained to accept the current system as inevitable, but SSNs aren't a security mechanism. The underlying absurdity is that we view leaking them as a disaster rather than recognizing and replacing the fact that we all rely on their secrecy. If someone wants to impersonate your identity, they can usually find a way. This breach will certainly make that easier, but I'm not sure it will affect the actual fraud rate. Time will tell. (I'm aware far more than SSNs were leaked. The point is that it was a bad idea to have this central point of failure in the first place. If it wasn't Equifax, it would've been someone else.)

kibwen 9y ago
> The very next commit could make that pentest obsolete. Ditto for spinning up a server. This is addressed by "vigilance". And no, we still aren't asking for perfect security. Even on human-scale timeframes, the odds of a single exploitable vulnerability being introduced in any aspect of the software, for even a moment, are 100%. But if it takes only a single vulnerability to completely exfiltrate the whole of a company's sensitive data, then you're going to be hard-pressed to find anyone calling that a securely-designed system. I'm sincerely sorry that a career spent in the trenches has left you so jaded and cynical, but we can do better, and hopefully we as an industry do so before the government looks at our inability to self-regulate and imposes double-secret-hyper-SOX on all of us.

kibwen 9y ago

> The very next commit could make that pentest obsolete. Ditto for spinning up a server. This is addressed by "vigilance". And no, we still aren't asking for perfect security. Even on human-scale timeframes, the odds of a single exploitable vulnerability being introduced in any aspect of the software, for even a moment, are 100%. But if it takes only a single vulnerability to completely exfiltrate the whole of a company's sensitive data, then you're going to be hard-pressed to find anyone calling that a securely-designed system. I'm sincerely sorry that a career spent in the trenches has left you so jaded and cynical, but we can do better, and hopefully we as an industry do so before the government looks at our inability to self-regulate and imposes double-secret-hyper-SOX on all of us.