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That is a pretty realistic budget if you are considering an entire school district. Broward County Public Schools has 327 schools with 271,517 students [1] and

by Veserv 6y ago

That is a pretty realistic budget if you are considering an entire school district. Broward County Public Schools has 327 schools with 271,517 students [1] and ~28,000 employees [2]. So, that is ~830 students/school and an ask for an extra ~$61k/school which is significantly less than one extra full time person per school. That is ~$73/student which is ~1% of the per-student expenditure of ~$7300/student [3]. However, cybersecurity spending is effectively worthless from an outcome perspective as even Fortune 500 companies allocating hundreds of millions of dollars per year to cybersecurity can not protect against attackers with ~$100k. Given that the hackers were demanding $40M, there is no commercial IT system in the world that would even claim to make such an attack unprofitable let alone actually be able to do so. The best systems are somewhere on the order of ~10% of that level, so we would need systems literally 10x better than the best currently available commercial IT systems for it to even be possible to get adequate cybersecurity against this attack. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broward_County_Public_Schools https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broward_County_Public_Schools [2] https://www.browardschools.com/cms/lib/FL01803656/Centricity/Domain/13447/FY21%20Budget%20Book%202nd%20Hearing%20V6%208-31-20_B.pdf https://www.browardschools.com/cms/lib/FL01803656/Centricity... Page 35 [3] https://www.browardschools.com/cms/lib/FL01803656/Centricity/Domain/13447/FY21%20Budget%20Book%202nd%20Hearing%20V6%208-31-20_B.pdf https://www.browardschools.com/cms/lib/FL01803656/Centricity... Page 36

asdff 6y ago
At what point do businesses just stop investing at all in cyber security, and just build in some redundancies in their organization to make it not matter at all if, say, the website went down, or you could readily get another redundant simple email server operating? I like to think that some businesses have an organizational structure that is so simple or baked in with more difficult-to-hack checks and balances, like the use of paper, that make them impervious to a hacker. On one end of the spectrum, we have my local taco truck which makes decent business having zero web presence at all, and of course various local convenient stores and other small shops who might be doing their books in excel, not much different really than how they did their books when they bought paper spreadsheets from the store. These small businesses are uniquely immune to a hacker. What would or could a hacker even do to something like a locksmith or a liquor store? Not much I don't think. There must be some lessons from this low tech way of doing business that can be carried over to large businesses, who have probably been oversold technology for decades by vendors looking to make sales. Maybe larger organizations should operate more like federations of smaller businesses. Like a franchise system but even more decentralized, using as little technology as possible, and the oldest, most proven tooling available to solve the job when technology is needed, rather than the newfangled thing everyone is blogging/tweeting/selling to you (that could probably be done with some awk).

by Veserv 6y ago

asdff 6y ago

At what point do businesses just stop investing at all in cyber security, and just build in some redundancies in their organization to make it not matter at all if, say, the website went down, or you could readily get another redundant simple email server operating? I like to think that some businesses have an organizational structure that is so simple or baked in with more difficult-to-hack checks and balances, like the use of paper, that make them impervious to a hacker. On one end of the spectrum, we have my local taco truck which makes decent business having zero web presence at all, and of course various local convenient stores and other small shops who might be doing their books in excel, not much different really than how they did their books when they bought paper spreadsheets from the store. These small businesses are uniquely immune to a hacker. What would or could a hacker even do to something like a locksmith or a liquor store? Not much I don't think. There must be some lessons from this low tech way of doing business that can be carried over to large businesses, who have probably been oversold technology for decades by vendors looking to make sales. Maybe larger organizations should operate more like federations of smaller businesses. Like a franchise system but even more decentralized, using as little technology as possible, and the oldest, most proven tooling available to solve the job when technology is needed, rather than the newfangled thing everyone is blogging/tweeting/selling to you (that could probably be done with some awk).