Let me rephrase that; Skipping reindexing punch cards: If your adversary can write some ASM to get the EIP to point to a malicious instruction, they can instruct your system to do something you don't necessarily want it to do. Then our homies at bell labs built C, as a layer of abstraction to ASM. With C, your adversary has several ways to accomplish getting the EIP to his malicious instruction. Then, over the years, many brilliant, incredible minds, (no sarcasm about that. None.) have built abstractions to simplify C, and then built abstractions on top of those abstractions, and then abstractions to simplify those abstractions. (I'm totally not even going to touch networking protocols) There is decades, of building systems with flaws, on top of systems with security flaws, (which admittedly wasn't as much of a concern to anyone, as providing the functionality to accomplish objectives, business and otherwise) ... literally, like over half a century of this. So then these middle-management suits, operating with "LEAN 6-Sigma" misconceptions about the nature of the world, expect a kid, with a degree in anthropology (not knocking the study) to run through a 12-week intensive program, and be able to write code for a production system, with perhaps 2 people on their dev team of 8-16, and 3 folks in devops/IT who understand security to be able to proof all of that code, and make sure that your Gibson is bulletproof? It's unrealistic. If she wants to hack your Gibson, she's going to hack your Gibson. We're all going to attempt to stop that, and after we've failed, we will spend days filling out reports, talking to feds, and mitigating the damage. But we're continuously building onto a flawed mechanism, with another flawed mechanism. I mean, do you know any civil engineers who would say, "Oh hey this foundation is cracked, let's build something that tries to patch those cracks, and when that's broken, we'll build another level on top of that, and let's just obfuscate what's really going on underneath everything so that nobody who uses the building realizes it's unstable, and just hope it doesn't get too windy, or that there is an earthquake." ? Ipso Facto: When you launch some ransomware, that threatens the software reading a gyroscope to tip over an oil tanker if you aren't paid $1,000,000, and try to blame it on some kids who's only crime was curiosity, they will find a way to subvert the carefully measured security mechanisms you have put in place, to not only clear their names, and prove beyond the shadow of doubt that it was in fact YOU, who hatched this terrible plot, but also save the environment.
Sorry, I should have said that to begin with.