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Trust, not tech, is holding back a safer internet:
Opinion The tech sector is failing at cybersecurity. Global spending on the stuff is at $190 billion a year, a quarter of the US defense budget. That hasn't stemmed an estimated $7 trillion in annual cybercriminal damages. People are fond of saying that the Wild West days of the internet are over, but on those numbers an 1875 Dodge City bank vault looks like Fort Knox.
So where's the sheriff? There are plenty of posses; no end of companies both small and large selling security by the bushel. Firewalls, scanners, heuristic, intrinsic, behavioral, managed, managerial, in-cloud, on-prem, you can mix and match the buzzwords and buy into every new idea. What you can't do is make your systems safe.
If you do want a safe bet in cybersecurity, it's that things aren't going to change any time soon without some fundamental shift in how the market works – if 40 years of constant failure can be called working.
We have so little reason to trust what's on offer or those offering it. Several stories last week show this: Apple, which makes a big play of intrinsic platform security, is heading to court for ignoring user consent and silently gathering app data anyway. Microsoft, even as it announces the extension of its security platform into Linux, reveals it fumbled its switches on its service infrastructure and took business-critical access away from its customers. These are the big shots in town, but they can't shoot straight.
It's almost as if we can't rely on the private sector to protect us against crime. Guess what: we never could and we never will. The state has to take on that role – usually late, usually badly, and usually against the wishes of those who like their crimes kept in the private sector, but usually to better effect than the alternatives.
Public governance and policing of cybercrime is a mixed bag. After a decade or so of mischief, most legislatures got around in the 1990s to defining and outlawing computer misuse by unauthorized parties. If you get caught, there's at least a book to throw at you. It's the catching that's the problem.
State agencies concentrate on areas where IT is used to further more traditional crimes – drugs, extortion, organized theft and international money laundering, all those fun things. Less so the cybercrime that depends on the characteristic ability of the internet to let small groups operate at scale to commit data-centric badness and move on quickly from target to target. Effective policing here needs to replicate what works in the physical world: inhabit the places where the crimes take place, work with the consent of the general population, and become proficient with the tools, thought processes, and human networks of the criminals.
Would you trust the police – by extension, the state – with your data, personal or corporate? Bit of a problem there, especially with so many governments constantly banging on about forcing open encryption standards whether you like it or not. Yet that's the accommodation we've reached with the state over hundreds of years of postal services and old school telecommunications. We even consent to the massive increase in our legal vulnerability surface that comes when we buy a car.
[...] Criminality didn't end when the Wild West got its rule of law, and we never get the police we really want, just those we can put up with. We know we can't put up with cybersecurity that demands a defense budget-sized investment in return for a global crimewave. We need a better sheriff: let's draw up the job description.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 11, @05:19AM (7 children)
You go through a lot of effort to say absolutely nothing. You are simply in denial of your responsibility for the choices you make. You like to blame "systems" and "infrastructure" for your own failures, like those religious wackos that say, "It's god's will", or make some other excuse. Don't look to me for absolution. Like it or not, deny all you want, you are the system. You are responsible for how it functions
I am not making an "argument", I am merely stating a fundamental fact. Not my fault if that offends you personally
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday February 11, @05:34AM (6 children)
I said quite a bit. Your ignorance is not my content.
The obvious rebuttal is that you have zero knowledge of my choices nor have you made even the slightest effort to fix that. Thus, your criticism was clearly made without even the slightest consideration of or relevance to the choices I made.
In other words, you're another idiot on the internet. We get that. What bugs me here is the huge number of people who can't think for themselves or construct even a rudimentary moral/ethical argument, but they're so sure everyone else is bad. Well, get that huge beam out of your own eyes first before you start bitching about the mote in mine.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 11, @07:37PM (5 children)
Go see a psychiatrist, clearly you are nuts..
See? You just proved it. You're talking about your own self
If you want a better sheriff, you (collectively) merely have to vote for one, and/or more carefully vote for the people that appoint them. Either way it's up to you, not some wispy "system". Time to stop making excuses
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday February 12, @01:43AM (4 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 12, @03:38AM (3 children)
There is nothing else to add. Everything is quite simple. You are just in denial of the self evident.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday February 12, @05:57AM (2 children)
I quite agree. You've been adding nothing to this conversation the whole time.
Like your inability to grasp the concept of infrastructure?
That you are an idiot? No, I'm not denying that in the least.
What I find weird about all this is that you're not the first internet gunslinger to babble about "self-evident" things that you can't even describe coherently. There's a bit of the self-evident argument in philosophy such as the "I think therefore I am" or "the basis of economics is human choice", but I see no evidence you've ever heard of those guys much less are aping them.
So where does this narrative come from? Someone publish a book recently? I hope you didn't pay much for it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 12, @11:16PM (1 child)
There you go again, blaming your demon "infrastructure" instead of accepting responsibility for your choices. "Always somebody else's fault"
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday February 13, @03:52AM
I'm not interested in blame or imaginary demons. I'm interested in fixing things. You can't begin to understand how to fix problems like corruption or a poorly functioning society, if you don't understand the huge role infrastructure plays in that (here, legal, economic, and cultural). Your posts throughout this thread underline that statement! You talk about how simple everything is while both implicitly acknowledging the very role infrastructure plays and being completely helpless at solving the problems you complain about.