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john_strinlaiyesterday at 4:47 PM3 repliesview on HN

>As someone who's older, and is just generally gobsmacked all the time by the sloppiness in cybersecurity, all of this is just not surprising.

as someone who used to work in cybersec (and is also older), most of the time (in my experiences) it isnt sloppiness.

1) people fight tooth and nail against anything that inconveniences them. security is almost always going to be an inconvenience tradeoff, so it is always fought against. from every person and every department. rolling out 2fa was worse than pulling teeth, despite it being a single button press ("approve") on the phone, once or twice a day (or less). c-suite is the worst, demanding exclusions and bypasses. its hard to say no to your bosses boss when they refuse to use a password manager, refuse to setup 2fa, or whatever the case is.

2) security offers no immediate or visible return on investment. so, it gets little to no positive attention by c-suite and even less budget. you end up with underpaid, under-qualified, over-worked people trying to figure out which thing they might be able secure out of the 10 things that need securing. half of them will be tied up trying to explain to someone why they cant use the company name as their password or begging someone to use the password manager.

even here, a forum of hackers, security is often put in scare quotes and almost always mentioned beside the word "theater". people brag about still running windows 7, because it was the last good windows. antiviruses arent needed. X security feature is just a lie so that company Z can control my device. people get big mad when a company rolls out mandatory 2fa. and so on.

edit: case in point, on this thread a comment was just posted with "I think you can argue that cybersecurity doesn't really matter, in the grand scheme of things."


Replies

BobaFloutistyesterday at 6:43 PM

> once or twice a day (or less).

If that was all it was, people would be a lot less annoyed by it.

show 1 reply
jrm4yesterday at 8:57 PM

On 1) -- yes, but that's just how it is: I love the thing I read recently like "If people would just." -- okay, you can stop there, because people will never "just." But it really doesn't matter; you engineer the best you can around that. My favorite go to example here is elevators. We have successfully safety-engineered elevators so well that any idiot can shove their hand in front of a two ton door and the result will be so harmless that it's a common practice now. Surely we can do that for CLICKING ON LINKS.

2) is harder, for sure. Great point.

gdriftyesterday at 5:44 PM

Freedom, Security, Convenience. Choose two.