| I’ve been thinking about this topic thru the lens of moral philosophy lately. A lot of the “big lists of controls” security approaches correspond to duty ethics: following and upholding rules is the path to ethical behaviour. IT applies this control, manages exceptions, tracks compliance, and enforces adherence. Why? It’s the rule. Contrast with consequentialism (the outcome is key) or virtue ethics (exercising and aligning with virtuous characteristics), where rule following isn’t the main focus. I’ve been part of (heck, I’ve started) lots of debates about the value of some arbitrary control that seemed out of touch with reality, but framed my perspective on virtues (efficiency, convenience) or outcomes (faster launch, lower overhead). That disconnect in ethical perspectives made most of those discussions a waste of time. A lot of security debates are specific instances of general ethical situations; threat models instead of trolley problems. |
My current favourite one is the mandatory use of Web Application Firewalls (WAFs). They’re digital snake oil sold to organisations that have had “Must use WAF” on their checklists for two decades and will never take them off that list.
Most WAF I’ve seen or deployed are doing nothing other then burning money to heat the data centre air because they’re generally left them in “audit only mode”, sending logs to a destination accessed by no-one. This is because if a WAF enforces its rules it’ll break most web apps outright, and it’s an expensive exercise to tune them… and maintain this tuning to avoid 403 errors after every software update or new feature. So no-one volunteers for this responsibility which would be a virtuous ethical behaviour in an org where that’s not rewarded.
This means that recently I spun up a tiny web server that costs $200/mo with a $500/mo WAF in front of it that does nothing just so a checkbox can be ticked.