[indymike]

The first response will be to make laws to punish the perpetrators and to pass knee-jerk cybersecurity laws that create the illusion that something is being done.

The entire technology industry is built on a foundation of limited liability and has a tradition of being ok with defects (eh, it's a small bug). When do we get hardware that is guaranteed to perform and be safe, operating systems, languages and compliers that are safe? It's going to be very difficult to deal with liability in a strict sense. Who's at fault? The OS that had a bug, the library that made the syscall, the code that called the library, the script that ran the program, the network router that allowed the egress, or the user that pushed the button? (edit: fixed typo)