Hacker News Reader

Comment by dpark | Hacker News Reader

So Yahoo would have been insured for somewhere between $30 Billion and $3 Trillion in this scheme? That seems untenable. Good luck collecting from the bankrupt insurer.

View on HN

Good point, although the report states 3 billion user accounts were breached but this doesn't mean 3 billion people. I am guessing the vast majority of accounts did not contain any sensitive information.

And maybe insurance isn't the right word; the risk should probably fall to the company holding the data, not a third party who would never be able to audit every single step to ensure there is no weak link.

True, it wouldn't be 3 billion individuals claiming the benefit. Still the scale is so large that it would utterly bankrupt most companies to pay out for a single breach.

If the cost of disclosure was a dollar a user there's pretty much no way we'd see them voluntarily tell us they were hacked. We'd have to wait until the information got out some other way.

Not a perfect solution, but sure. "You're the weakest link - goodbye!" <everyone else flinches and reviews infosec>

I think hehheh is saying that a policy like this would strongly encourage hiding breaches. No one would openly admit a breach if they knew it would kill the company. The net effect would be less transparency, not better security.

The first step towards this is having useful industry standards for auditing and certification that actually work... then you can think about an insurance market where insurers force certification.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com