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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story from Bruce Schneier's blog:
Every few years, a researcher replicates a security study by littering USB sticks around an organization's grounds and waiting to see how many people pick them up and plug them in, causing the autorun function to install innocuous malware on their computers. These studies are great for making security professionals feel superior. The researchers get to demonstrate their security expertise and use the results as "teachable moments" for others. "If only everyone was more security aware and had more security training," they say, "the Internet would be a much safer place."
Enough of that. The problem isn't the users: it's that we've designed our computer systems' security so badly that we demand the user do all of these counterintuitive things. Why can't users choose easy-to-remember passwords? Why can't they click on links in emails with wild abandon? Why can't they plug a USB stick into a computer without facing a myriad of viruses? Why are we trying to fix the user instead of solving the underlying security problem?
Traditionally, we've thought about security and usability as a trade-off: a more secure system is less functional and more annoying, and a more capable, flexible, and powerful system is less secure. This "either/or" thinking results in systems that are neither usable nor secure.
[...] We must stop trying to fix the user to achieve security. We'll never get there, and research toward those goals just obscures the real problems. Usable security does not mean "getting people to do what we want." It means creating security that works, given (or despite) what people do. It means security solutions that deliver on users' security goals without -- as the 19th-century Dutch cryptographer Auguste Kerckhoffs aptly put it -- "stress of mind, or knowledge of a long series of rules."
[...] "Blame the victim" thinking is older than the Internet, of course. But that doesn't make it right. We owe it to our users to make the Information Age a safe place for everyone -- not just those with "security awareness."
(Score: 3, Informative) by bradley13 on Tuesday October 04 2016, @05:55AM
Not quite a fair analogy.
- Simple passwords = Be able to use a simple lock on an ordinary front door, not the front end of a bank vault.
- Click links in untrusted mail = Talk to strangers on your porch, without fear they are going to assault and rob you.
- Insert USB sticks = Pick up a dropped envelope to find out which neighbor lost it, without worrying that you will be infected with anthrax.
In this sense, the job of IT professionals is simple (difficult, but simply explained): create a sufficiently robust infrastructure that ordinary human behavior does not lead to catastrophe.
While some security holes are very abstruse, essentially impossible to foresee (Rowhammer), many are just plain stupidity. I still see advanced students and young professionals write code that is open to SQL injection. "Oh, it doesn't matter for this project".
The problems are manifold, but if we go all the way down to the bottom, the root issue may be the lack of any sort of verification of competence. We don't let amateurs (or incompetent professionals) design bridges, but what assurance do we have that the people writing kernel drivers know what they're doing? For all we know, they're script kiddies hired on the cheap. While any sort of global qualification body would be impossible (and likely corrupt), we could enforce qualifications through economics: If a bridge collapses due to faulty design, the company that built it will be held liable. The executives may even land in jail. Hold software companies to the same standard: Your IoT devices are spamming the Internet? Your company is liable for damages, plus getting those devices off of the Internet.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Wednesday October 05 2016, @04:41AM
That looks like a great analogy to me, and unfortunately things can't be the same on the internet. Because people have always been able to do terrible things to you. The only difference is that now it's super cheap to send 10,000 copies of junk mail without having to pay the post office. You know it sure would have been different if the email system was designed to allow individual network operators to charge some micropayment for the privilege of forwarding that mail. I suppose the main reason they couldn't, besides ideological reasons, is that microtransactions over the fledgling internet were simply uneconomical. You would need Bitcoin as a prerequisite to bring the transaction fees low enough, which obviously the designers of email couldn't have had. So it will be forever free to send email, lowering the bar to entry for every shady business practice, with no profit incentive for cleaning up the bottomfeeders.
And you know what? That's a good thing. We needed something as useful as email to make any progress on the internet, and its freedom has led to a lot of the success. Not that nobody pays for email. And it's a shame that it's not really possible to maintain a secure email server without the resources of a Google or a Yahoo. But wouldn't it be nice if the user of somebody with those resources was actually getting a fair experience? Without violating their privacy? With some semblance of market competition for the user's attention, not for the advertisers who are the real customers of the internet? If we can somehow eliminate advertising and the need for it, perhaps by making a more crowd-sourced information distribution system (like say SoylentNews or Reddit, or even more distributed like Diaspora), we could make the world a much safer place.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday October 06 2016, @02:59AM
Yeah, your *neighbors* are probably pretty safe. Physical distance provides much of the security of the real world. The internet doesn't have that. If you put Gates in his mansion in some slum in Elbonia he certainly wouldn't be stopping to talk to the neighbors on his porch or picking up dropped mail or using a standard household door lock. He'd be hiding behind big walls and armed guards -- assuming he doesn't do that already.
On the internet, you are *always* a tourist walking through the worst slum in a foreign city at 3am. Because anyone, anywhere can attack you at any time. You can't behave as you would around your friends and neighbors and assume you'll be safe, because you *aren't* around your friends and neighbors, you're around a bunch of random strangers all across the globe.
People *aren't* that trusting in the real world, and they shouldn't be online either. Consider how people still spread the stories about drugs and razor blades in Halloween candy every year. Even though it pretty much never happens. And even though if there's a razor blade in an apple, the whole damn neighborhood knows which house was giving out apples so it'd be no mystery who did it. The Internet is certainly less safe than knocking on neighborhood doors asking for candy, yet people so often don't think twice before doing the digital equivalent of shoveling down food from some anonymous stranger in Tehran. Sure, it's probably safe. But maybe they used contaminated discount ingredients, or it's expired, and they don't even know. Maybe it's been sitting unattended in the street for a week. Or maybe it's a big slice of Rohypnol pie.
And how many times in this country have we detonated someone's underwear because they left their suitcase lying outside? We treat every random suitcase like a potential bomb, but when it's a digital suitcase attached to an email we should assume there's no way it could be harmful?