5 ms·
There must be some infosec term for this, but I'd imagine it's close to "signal poisoning" - turning signal into noise.
by alexpetralia 5y ago
There must be some infosec term for this, but I'd imagine it's close to "signal poisoning" - turning signal into noise.
- chapium 5y agoAlarm fatigue.
- TheBill 5y agoAlert Fatigue.
- chapium 5y agoThat sounds more correct.
- Rebelgecko 5y agoThe alarm that cried wolf
- bredren 5y agoReminds me of Sentry’s “ignore this until it happens x times.”
- jhgb 5y agoPretty much the same thing is already called "semantic satiation" when it comes to language.
- xoa 5y agoAs well as what others have said ("alarm fatigue") specifically to this case, I think it falls under the more general category of "Resource Exhaustion Attacks". Most tech types think of those primarily in the context of DDOS. But the fundamental idea behind it, where an attacker doesn't exploit any specific weakness in the system but rather seeks to exhaust some finite consumable resource necessary to the system's operation, applies to a lot of different areas of modern society. And not just security either, humans in general have finite attention and mental resources. Rather then seek to convince people of any specific thing, or hack a forum or the like, attackers may seek to simply spam so much noise, or to use asymmetrical rhetorical hacks (argument is low energy to write but high energy to refute), that a target population runs out of energy to respond. All security involves an economic equation of finite resources for both defenders and attackers. Defenders definitely have to consider the ratios there, and particularly if they've made any implicit assumptions of a given resource as unlimited (like in this case, a guard's tolerance for tech SNAFU bullshit).
- alexpetralia 5y agoWonderful explanation, thank you.
- Cthulhu_ 5y agoNot so much infosec, but "the boy who cried wolf" is the folklore story to go with it. It's one reason why audible car alarms are phased out - they go off so frequent and falsely (e.g. because of a cat) that they don't have the desired effect of people looking at what's going on or deterring a thief.
- panxyh 5y agoThey certainly draw attention at night.
- thanatos519 5y agoI learned the wrong lesson from that story as a child: Even when I was not the perpetrator, I always made sure to look guilty, and was in most cases exonerated. Eventually when I was the perpetrator, nobody would believe it was me, even if I looked guilty!