3 ms·

> They do whatever seems to be the strongest possible thing It's not that, it's inertia and poor incentive structures. In a large organization, if a policy wa

> They do whatever seems to be the strongest possible thing It's not that, it's inertia and poor incentive structures. In a large organization, if a policy was set in place by someone else, then, even when you know it's a sub-par policy, it's still in your interest to leave it alone. Doing so gives you a way to deflect blame in the event of a breach related to that decision. You can just blame the policy itself. If, on the other hand, you change the policy, you're more likely to be held personally accountable. That said, you're also absolutely right about the expertise problem. I don't know much about government, but, in private industry, I've observed that the best way to get put in charge of cybersecurity is to start from somewhere completely outside of IT, and become good friends with the CEO.

craftinator 6y ago
> It's not that, it's inertia and poor incentive structures. This is the psychological/economics point of view, and I think it's the correct one for this problem. The other tricky issue, besides the CYA prioritization, is that being a dynamic entity requires other entities to do the same. If you start changing procedures in your section, other sections that rely on you need to adapt to these, and they may have the CYA attitude and resist that change.
Godel_unicode 6y ago
It's certainly possible that in some cases that's true, but there are a lot of government check-box security people who genuinely believe complex passwords rotated frequently are a good security control. There's also a general heuristic with many people in security that the more convenient something is, the less secure it is. Therefore smart card auth must be worse!