alt Hacker NewsOn one side, you have pieces like this, where seemingly there are constant fights between serious actors with large and properly distributed budgets, employing top tech and top minds; on the other - regular news of the hackz, where responsible person in charge of security with root access failed to grasp basic technical knowledge (several times), ticking every checkbox in "never do this" list from security best practices, which led to every customer being pwned.
It's like two parallel worlds, that exist in the same place at the same time, but somehow don't cross.
Replies
I think that's going to be the central tension of the next few years. The article suggests that software becoming more secure is going to lead to renewed calls for a "legitimate" backdoor for law enforcement to access everything about the device. Well, that security means nothing if someone phishes Kash Patel, something which has already happened. You go through the weak link, which is almost always the human.
I could see a future where the government is replaced by the software system which has the fewest security flaws, simply because it is the last thing left standing as everybody hacks everybody else. We end up with a Matrix-like or Terminator-like future where humanity now lives in service of the machines.
K shaped economy and K shaped development?
I started my career in the military, and got lucky enough that SOMEHOW, we convinced them to fund a trip to GDQ for educational purposes.
Anyways, while there I attended a little roundtable on software security. It was me, representing a small unit from the Air Force, some dude from Google, and like 15 game devs.
Despite only being a dev of 5 years at that point, I was SHOCKED at the lack of knowledge on software security. Even simple concepts seemed completely foreign to the game devs, though the Google dude seemed to have a really solid understanding of security.
Obviously game devs and website devs and all kinds of devs have different focuses, but it just blew my mind that out of all the topics there I might’ve been considered a comparative expert in, security was somehow the one. I wasn’t sure if that was a major plus for military devs or a major concern for the other devs, but now I’m starting to learn in the latter direction.