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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Well, angry anonymous commenter, I've been working in software security since (checks notes) 1993, and professionally since 1995, and the claim you're making just doesn't hold up. "The Internet" may have subsumed all sorts of things, but it's ~1.5 behind computers and telecommunications. Before there was an Internet, the world ran on dial-up modems and X.25, and people were breaking into things then too.

Things have gotten better, not worse, and personally, if I was being more aggressive about the argument (which I guess I am now), I'd go further and say you can't have been paying any attention in the 1990s (or to the history of what happened in the 1980s) and think otherwise.

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I'm stating the following since I've seen you appeal to your work history and say "trust me, I've been in this for a long time" far too many times to give you a pass here. There are plenty of tptacek posts on HN, where it is crystal clear to anyone with similar years in the domain as yours that you're either entirely wrong or deliberately misleading. You need to make a proper argument if you want to convince me.

There were computers, telecommunications, dial-up modems, X.25 and private networks in the 90s but the degree of cohesion, sublimation and intra-connectivity wasn't anywhere close to what we have today. Consequently, the actor domain looked very different and concepts such as cyberwarfare weren't even in the public eye. Morris worm vs NotPetya. Sure, barrier to entry was very low compared to now. But, as Dan Geer has repeatedly shown, risk has grown tremendously even if the field has gotten a lot harder. You don't think that completely disproves you?

Dan Geer is wrong. I already made the argument, upthread. I'm responding to your appeal to his authority with an appeal to my own experience. It has gotten harder to break into things, not easier. The Morris Worm was arguably bigger deal than NotPetya --- certainly, it was more sophisticated. Every couple years, there's some malware or other that manages to infect huge numbers of machines. IIRC, Nimda took down the entire Naval Marine Corps Internet. They said then that we had crossed some threshold, and from now on attackers were just going to get worse. Who cares? Guess what: the opposite thing happened.

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