[delusional]

>There’s a whole class of security vulnerabilities that let you read from arbitrary files on the filesystem.

This is maybe putting the cart before the horse a little bit. The reason there's a class of vulnerabilities that allow arbitrary read is that we've, as an industry, decided that we classify file access as a vulnerability. It's not that file access is somehow materially different or easier from any other security issue, it's just that we set that as one of the goals of an attack.

If you decide that an attack is successful when it reads a file, then you'll obviously get a clustering of successful attacks that read files.

[skissane]

It isn’t just about preventing vulnerabilities, it is also about limiting the damage they can cause. Suppose you have a web app, with customer data in a remote relational database. An arbitrary file read vulnerability, in itself, might not actually help an attacker in stealing your customer data, since it is in a remote DB not the web app’s filesystem. But if that vulnerability enables them to exfiltrate database credentials, that gets them one step closer to actually stealing your customer data, which can be an enormously costly legal and PR headache. (By itself, those credentials won’t be that useful, since hopefully your firewall will block direct public access to the DB - but a lot of successful attacks involve chaining multiple vulnerabilities/weaknesses - e.g. they compromise some employee laptop that lets them talk to the DB but they don’t have credentials, and now they have the credentials too.)

Whereas, if all they manage to steal using a file read vulnerability is the code (possibly even just the binaries if you are using a compiled language like Go or Java) of your web app - that’s not good either, but it is a lot smaller headache. You’d much rather be having to tell the CEO “attackers stole the binaries of our app” than “attackers stole all the PII of our customers”. Both are bad but the second is a lot worse. The first kind of attack you possibly won’t be obliged to disclose, the second you legally will be