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Is it really that bad? Probably
3 comments- IT TOPICS:Security
I've been arguing that we're losing the battle against hackers for a while, but Noam Eppel argues that we, the security community, have already suffered a 'complete, unquestionable and total failure of information security'. While I don't agree with the severity of the judgement that Noam puts forth in the article, I do agree that we are losing ground and are one major vulnerability away from an Internet meltdown.
I disagree with the assumption that we, as security professionals, don't know the trouble we're in. He uses the old urban legend of "boiling frog syndrome" to illustrate how things are getting worse and no one is noticing. Anyone who's been in security for long knows that the cybercriminals are innovating at an incredible rate. All a hacker has to do is find a single new vulnerability. Security professionals have to protect against every known vulnerability as well as anticipating new vulnerabilitiies. We have to defend every system, all a cybercriminal has to do is find one vulnerable system.
What I wish Noam had done is offer up some possible fixes. (Correction: Noam will be offering up some solutions in a second article in the near future.) But the problem is, there aren't any quick fixes. The real solution to issues like spam and hackers would be to change the nature of the Internet to make these sort of attacks impossible. Unluckily, no one can agree on the nature of the changes that would need to be made. Everyone is, rightly, afraid that either the government or big business would take over the Internet in the process. A good example is AOL's recent push to change the nature of email that comes through their systems. And no one wants to hand the current open Internet structure to government to manage.
I think we know we're losing the battle against cybercriminals. Our awareness of the issues is not the problem; it's the fact that we would need to make major changes to the Internet to do any real good. And no one wants to make those changes. We can feel the water tempature rising, but do we want to jump out of the water and into fire?
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