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There's a lot of great comments in this thread pointing at different aspects of this issue. I think it's actually more complex than all of that, because while
by tristor 5y ago
There's a lot of great comments in this thread pointing at different aspects of this issue. I think it's actually more complex than all of that, because while all of these things are true, it misses the primary cause of bad information security: People.
At every layer of nearly every company, nobody has any understanding of information security. Where-as, as a society, we have at least a basic understanding of physical security (we understand the gist of a lock, and use them regularly, and guard the keys), we have basically zero understanding of information security.
I've worked, in some capacity, around information security for nearly my entire career and I have found that even people I highly respect as technologists rarely have any knowledge of information security. Most of the information security side of the industry is filled with people who are trained on compliance and regulations, not on security, and they are seen as completely synonymous. Security has to be layered in order to be effective, yet that's been taken to mean several layers of different types of brightly colored middle-boxes with pretty dashboards, rather than an actual layering of security principles and a reasonable organizational posture. While these things can be tools, they are treated as solutions rather than tools that help you create a solution.
Most SWEs know next to nothing about application security. Most web devs don't even know what OWASP is, much less have any understanding of web security. Most networking folks (even those with Network Security in their title) know little about network protocols and protocol security, instead being glorified firewall rule writers. Most security architects only know about compliance and policy, nothing about actually identifying threat vectors and constructing robust organizational postures. And most executives don't care beyond what's required to comply with the law or their contractual agreements so leave it to "experts".
Most of the "experts" aren't experts. The fraud with information security isn't just what's being perpetrated by attackers, it's also what's being perpetrated by the entire information security industry, which is mostly filled with puff pieces calling themselves "experts" who don't actually understand anything about security at all, as well as vendors who sell security products that themselves may not be secure on the backend but have privileged access within their client's data environments.
All an attacker must do is find your weakest link. What you must do to protect yourself is ensure that your weakest link is stronger than anyone else's strongest link. There's a huge disparity in the effort and investment required, and it's an issue that can't simply be resolved by throwing money at it because most of the people lining up to take your money are their own sort of attacker committing their own sort of fraud.
- foxfluff 5y agoAnd then you occasionally have people who know a thing or two but their hands are tied because organizations are dysfunctional and people have no autonomy.. or worse yet, are punished for sticking their nose into things that weren't on their task list.