[davidbanham]

Exactly. It's not hard, it just costs some money.

It's exactly the same as physical security. You build fences and buy locks. You pay people to keep an eye on things. You take insurance to cover the rest of the risk.

Nothing hard, no new inventions required. It just takes some attention and cash. It's part of the cost of being in business.

[joe_the_user]

Wait, the hardness of information security comes because it has to be built-in everywhere since everything is connected and so everything is a potential attack surface.

It's not impossible but it requires a somewhat universal attitude change.

[sillysaurus3]

I want to agree with you in principle, but in practice it's not possible to be secure with just an attitude change. The attack surfaces have grown too large. Keeping track of all possible vectors is a full-time job in itself. You either need a dedicated security person or regular pentests. And honestly, regular pentests are probably more effective.

It's a positive statement though: it is possible to be constantly secure if you just get a pentest every few weeks. Big companies can even afford to make it a requirement of their release cycle.

[noxToken]

> Big companies can even afford to make it a requirement of their release cycle.

Oh man. I have a peer who works for a very large international company. They require pentests in their release cycle. What could go wrong?

Turns out that pentesting isn't in the final portion of their release. They tag a release candidate (e.g. v5.7.0-rc), send that build to the pentesters, then fix other integration and user-acceptance bugs while the pentesters are working. The pentesters may greenlight v5.7.0-rc when it's really v5.7.3-rc that's shipping, and the pentesters are none the wiser.

Security only works when the culture supports it.

[joe_the_user]

Attitude change in the sense of not being willing to allow inherently insecure architectures - management always moving the company towards secure-on-principle architectures (not that I'm qualified to say if it's a good example but Google's BeyondCorp is an example of aiming to make everything secure on principle meaning not leaky on principle). That added to any pentesting or other necessary immediate security measures.

The impression I have is that today's event was the result of a lot of companies allowing insecure-on-principle architectures like a zillion apps each with their own update structure (random Ukrainian enterprise app supplier gets penetrated and the whole world goes down). A pentester might never be able to find that vector until that app supplier leaves their door open or someone finds out about them for example.