alt Hacker News> The reason is simple - nothing really bad has happened that we can point at and say "ah, shit, let's all learn collectively". I know it sounds naive when I say it, but there hasn't been a significantly consequential hack, leak, destruction, or anything related to cybersecurity where it led for concerns of people.
How consequential does a hack need to be? Troy has collected literally billions of stolen credentials. Equifax has had high profile data leaks. Tens of millions of people have been directly compromised by ransomware (likely higher because that’s just the cases we know of) and you hear about state-sponsored hacks in the news all the time.
The problem isn’t that computer security isn’t in the public consciousness. The problem is people are lazy and security often requires trading convenience. The problem is also that security isn’t free. So the business incentives just isn’t there.
In other fields of engineering, people die when shortcuts are taken. Yet businesses will still take shortcuts, so governments have to legislate rules to save people’s lives. So why would you expect software companies to do better when the stakes are lower?
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> Tens of millions of people have been directly compromised by ransomware (likely higher because that’s just the cases we know of) and you hear about state-sponsored hacks in the news all the time.
With no consequences. Everyone just churns along. It might be detrimental to the business a little bit, but from my personal experience, there's more effort in creating DR processes, rather than preventing an attack, exploit, leak and etc.
I'm also not going to put much effort on stuff which has small returns in the worst case scenario. Like Equifax got hacked in 2017, and company is still doing fine. And that's like top tier data one could acquire.
People aren't that lazy. The organizations getting hacked by ransomware aren't particularly lazy, they're often pretty productive within their domain. Hospitals, airports, etc.
The actual problem is that computer security is a black hole. If you let it, it will suck in everything and destroy it. Nobody knows what works so you can spend infinite amounts of time and money on it, then still get popped by a teenager in Belarus. Your security team will accept no responsibility for this, there will be no falling on swords or personal liability, and they will just use it to demand even more money in an infinite spiral.
So the average executive looks at this situation and says, OK, something we can put infinity effort into and still suddenly fail at without warning is a total non-starter. What are we obliged to do? How do we show we made an effort?
And that's how you end up with a culture oriented around passing audits. It's not wrong, and it's not lazy. It's just really hard to do better because it's not clear how to set budgets without a concrete goal to aim for.