[Nextgrid]

The purpose of cybersecurity products and companies is not to sell security. It's to sell the illusion of security to (often incompetent) execs - which is perfectly fine because the market doesn't actually punish security breaches so an illusion is all that's needed. It is an insanely lucrative industry selling luxury-grade snake oil.

Actual cybersecurity isn't something you can just buy off-the-shelf and requires skill and making every single person in the org to give a shit about it, which is already hard to achieve, and even more so when you've tried for years to pay them as little as you can get away with.

[bootsmann]

Actually there is a significant push to more effective products coming from the reinsurance companies that underwrite cyber risks. Most of them come with a checklist of things you need to have before they sign you at any reasonable price. The more we get government regulation for fines in cases of breaches etc. the more this trend will accelerate.

[nostrademons]

The thing is that real security isn't something that a checklist can guarantee. You have to build it into the product architecture and mindset of every engineer that works on the project. At every single stage, you have to be thinking "How do I minimize this attack surface? What inputs might come in that I don't expect? What are the ways that this code might be exploited that I haven't thought about? What privileges does it have that it doesn't need?"

I can almost guarantee you that your ordinary feature developer working on a deadline is not thinking about that. They're thinking about how they can ship on time with the features that the salesguy has promised the client. Inverting that - and thinking about what "features" you're shipping that you haven't promised the client - costs a lot of money that isn't necessary for making the sale.

So when the reinsurance company mandates a checklist, they get a checklist, with all the boxes dutifully checked off. Any suitably diligent attacker will still be able to get in, but now there's a very strong incentive to not report data breaches and have your insurance premiums go up or government regulation come down. The ecosystem settles into an equilibrium of parasites (hackers, who have silently pwned a wide variety of computer systems and can use that to setup systems for their advantage) and blowhards (executives who claim their software has security guarantees that it doesn't really).

[bootsmann]

> but now there's a very strong incentive to not report data breaches and have your insurance premiums go up or government regulation come down

I would argue the opposite is true. Insurance doesn’t pay out if you don’t self-report in time. Big data breaches usually get discovered when the hacker tries to peddle off the data in a darknet marketplace so not reporting is gambling that this won’t happen.

[awesome_dude]

Curious how the compromised company can report if the compromise has not been detected

[RGamma]

There need to be much more powerful automated tools. And they need to meet critical systems where they are.

Not very long ago actual security existed basically nowhere (except air-gapping, most of the time ;)). And today it still mostly doesn't because we can't properly isolate software and system resources (and we're very far away from routinely proving actual security). Mobile is much better by default, but limited in other ways.

Heck, I could be infected with something nasty and never know about it: the surface to surveil is far too large and constantly changing. Gave up configuring SELinux years ago because it was too time-consuming.

I'll admit that much has changed since then and I want to give it a go again, maybe with a simpler solution to start with (e.g. never grant full filesystem access and network for anything).

We must gain sufficiently powerful (and comfortable...) tools for this. The script in question should never have had the kind of access it did.

[bostik]

> The thing is that real security isn't something that a checklist can guarantee.

I've taken this even further. You cannot do security with a checklist. Trying to do so will inevitably lead to bad outcomes.

Couple of years back I finally figured out how to dress this in a suitably snarky soundbite: doing security with a spreadsheet is like trying to estimate the health of a leper colony by their number of remaining limbs.

[w10-1]

You are asserting that security has to be hand-crafted. That is a very strong claim, if you think about it.

Is it not possible to have secure software components that only work when assembled in secure ways? Why not?

Conversely, what security claims about a component can one rely upon, without verifying it oneself?

How would a non-professional verify claims of security professionals, who have a strong interest in people depending upon their work and not challenging its utility?

[Paracompact]

Not the person you are responding to, but: I would agree that at the stage of full maturity of cybersecurity tooling and corporate deployment, configuration would be canonical and painless, and robust and independent verification of security would be possible by less-than-expert auditors. At such a stage of maturity, checklist-style approaches make perfect sense.

I do not think we're at that stage of maturity. I think it would be hubris to imitate the practices of that stage of maturity, enshrining those practices in the eyes of insurance underwriters.

[Nextgrid]

Corporate security is beyond merely making sure software itself is secure.

Phishing for example requires no security vulnerabilities, and is one of the primary initial attack vectors into a company.

You need proper training and the right incentives for people to actually care and think before they act.

[baxtr]

You’re making many assumptions which fit your worldview.

I can assure you that insurers don’t work like that.

If underwriting was as sloppy as you think it is insurance as a business model wouldn’t work.

[Veserv]

Err, cybersecurity insurance as a business model has not worked. I have seen analyst reports showing that there have been multiple large claims that are each individually larger than all premiums ever collected industry wide. Those same reports indicated that all the large cybersecurity insurance vendors were basically no longer issuing policies with significant coverage, capping out at the few million dollar range. Cybersecurity insurance is picking up pennies in front of a steamroller; you wonder why no one else is picking up this free money on the ground until you get crushed.

Note, that is not to say that cybersecurity insurance if fundamentally impossible, just that the current cost structure and risk mitigation structure is untenable and should not be pointed at as evidence of function.

[cjbgkagh]

The financial sector is famously sloppy and it’s still doing just fine.

[VladVladikoff]

Holy those checklists are the bane of my existence. For example demanding 2FA for email, which is impossible if you self host, unless you force everyone to use RoundCube, but then you have to answer to the CEO why he can’t get email on his iPhone in the mail app.

Or just loads of other stuff that really only applies to large Fortune 500 size companies. My small startups certainly don’t have a network engineer on staff who has created a network topology graph and various policies pertaining to it, etc etc. the list goes on, I could name 100s of absurd requirements these insurance companies want that don’t actually add any level of security to the organization, and absolutely do not apply to small scale shops.

[briHass]

And... this is why the hyperscale cloud is such a compelling choice, even though it costs 10x what running your own servers would cost.

Adding the security feature(s) you need is just a +$100/m checkbox, and they generally have sane defaults or templates that will position you better than some 3rd party vendor with confusing documentation and infrequent updates that require downtime windows to apply.

[JambalayaJimbo]

Why is 2FA impossible if you self host?

[VladVladikoff]

IMAP is ancient and in its own does not support 2FA. You could do it with webmail clients but you can’t do it with plain ol’ IMAP. I have seen some attempts at it where the password is concatenated with the TOTP, but the nature of mail clients frequent polling means users would be constantly hammers with requests to reauthenticate. There is an RFC for OAUTH2 BEARER support and there are even some servers which support it (eg Stalwart IIRC) however there are literally zero clients which support it (AFAIK). And you especially can’t use any of the main top 10 email clients that most people use, there may be some small obscure mail client that supports it, but even Thunderbird lacks support.

[technion]

I'm mostly with you (see my other comment) but MFA on email really is table stakes and your CEO will be the first to be phished without it.

[noAnswer]

I like to implement independent mail systems. No SSO BS. IT enters the password into the mail client while setting up the laptop and phone. The boss can't be phished if he doesn't know his password (or if the password has no use on the internet).

I also like to put everything behind a VPN (again no SSO). But the bigger the company gets, sooner or later this will come to an end. Because it's not "best practice" to not be phishable. Apparently what is needed are layers and layers of BS "security" products that can be tricked by a kid that has heard of JS. https://browser.security

[technion]

Those checklists are frequently answered like this:

"Hey it says we need to do mobile management and can't just let people manage their own phones. Looks like we'll buy Avanti mobile manager". Same conversation I've seen play out with generally secure routers being replaced with Fortigates that have major vulnerabilities every week because the checklist says you must be doing SSL interception.

[awesome_dude]

I think, to add to the comment, the whole raison d'être of zero days is that an (exploitable) bug has been found that the producer of the software is not aware of/has not produced a patch for.

It's fine to say "Look this is bad, don't do" and "A patch was issued for this, you are responsible" but when some set of circumstances arises that has not been thought about before that cause a problem, then there's nothing that could have been done to stop it.

Note that the entire QA industry is explicitly geared to try and look at software being produced in a way that nobody else has thought to, in order to find if that software still behaves "correctly", and <some colour of hat> hackers are an extension of that - people looking at software in a way that developers and QA did not think of.. etc

[Nextgrid]

Defense in depth and multiple layers of security should ideally protect against zero-days; see the Swiss cheese model of accidents for an example; most aviation accidents are rarely caused by a single factor but an improbable combination of factors.

This is why I also think “zero trust” and internet-accessible SaaS has done so much damage to the industry. Before, if your version control server has a vuln, the attackers still need to get on your VPN to even be able to scan for that vuln. Now, your version control server is on the internet and/or is an SaaS and all it takes is an exploit or a set of phished credentials for anyone anywhere in the world to get in.

[awesome_dude]

> Defense in depth and multiple layers of security should ideally protect against zero-days

Absolutely agree, and that's why instant security in a can (just add water!) cannot work (as you have been saying)

[cortesoft]

It's also selling box checks for various certifications.

[chha]

So true. Can't wait for NIS2 to be implemented in my location (EU); the new directive allows authorities to hold board members and CEOs personally responsible for cybersec fails (although only as a last resort, after trying other means).