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Comment by Simon321 | Hacker News Reader

If you work in security, this resonates so much. No one really cares about security except to check a box or pay lip service to it. That's why so called security products ship without logging and clients don't want to make the smallest effort to enable you to improve their security. It's why companies that sell security products invest more in marketing than the product. The industry is full of conmen and marketeers. Information security can be great though if you find someone that really cares.

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Bro (or Sis? :) )! They're not supposed to care about security, you are! Our job in infosec is to show others how insecurity affects what they care about so in order reduce,transfer or eliminate risk to what they care about they allow us to implement good security. The failure is on the infosec side of the equation.

It confounds and mildly pisses me off when people get pissed and get burned out over suits not caring about infosec. I mean,they care about promotions,reputation,bottom line,ROI,KPI,etc... That's what they do. You know why the marketeers and buzzword snakeoil salesmen prosper? It is because they communicate not only risk but especially [fake] solutions better! Infosec is full of user and management blaming, expecting peoppe outside of software developers and infosec practitioners to care about infosec. I am not saying I have it figured out but I am fairly certain users and decision makers need to be told solutions within the context of risk that affects them. And if it doesn't affct them they're not supposed to care.

I'll give you an example, a network is filled with tls1.0,and ssl1.3, how does that affect some mid sized company's bottom line or reputation? How do they get ROI on the man hours and resources spent to upgrade everythig to TLS1.3 with proper cipher suites and key exchange? and what KPI can they use to measure efficiency of resources? How will you tell them security hygeine takes a very long time to show ROI as do many other security concepts?

You don't really have to do all that if you don't want to, plenty of skill demand to where you can progress to more exciting positions.

This is what happens when companies don't understand security.

https://www.csoonline.com/article/3410278/the-biggest-data-b...

You think a million a year is expensive? It's not - not if it's saving you a $200m fine, and possible class action damages.

The trick is, how do you estimate risk of such problems in a particular company, in order to provide the suits with an expected dollar figure?

It's tough for me to think that Yahoo! didn't "understand security," and yet, their entire user database was ganked. I have to assume that they were doing everything they could to implement all of the white paper suggestions and consulting recommendations they could get their hands on. I also presume they were running the largest, most-expensive "security" products that they could buy. The depressing thought that struck me at the time was: if one of the biggest web properties to ever exist couldn't figure out how to secure their database, what hope do the rest of us have? (Maybe I'm being naive; I've never seen a disclosure on the nature of the intrusion.)

All of this sort of thing leads me to think that there is currently a huge mismatch between the security products industry, and how companies implement all the conflicting white paper snake oil, and what the ACTUAL vulnerabilities are. And I know how stupid this mismatch winds up making the average Fortune 500 worker bee's daily life. But that's a topic for another post.

Pretty much.

I think it's difficult but there's almost no doubt that Yahoo would have people who understand the problem with security. The problem is, were they, and did they have the power to reign this in at scale?

All too often, you get risk people buying products then asking for all your logs, promising the easy silver bullet. Being a pessimistic engineer, you're unlikely to ever be near a leadership position with people who want easy answers.

The problem is, the person who refuses to understand this, typically includes the senior guys in InfoSec who own this, and will continue to do so irregardless of how you present it.

I mean, who else is buying a SEIM, asking for all logs, and then hoping it'll take care of everything? That's the CISO, Director, VP, Head Of, etc.

I did work at a major cable company building customer premises hardware about 5 years back (the only reason I'm sharing this story). They were alerted to a major, easily exploited and REALLY stupid vulnerability in their system that exposed their core management network for the product to customers. They just hired the guy who reported it then fixed the problem 6 months later. The short-term mitigation was to put passwords on all their database servers (they were not there previously).

Security was just not a concern until they had a major breach. The security teams had been screaming bloody murder for a while, but could not get the product teams to allocate sprint bandwidth to the massive, coordinated security hardening effort that needed to happen to prevent a potential headline in the New York Times.

Why doesn't legal have to fight the same fights? Their domain seems similar: Legal problems take years to surface, and when they blow up, they explode spectacular. Implementing procedures involving legal is a huge drain of time, motivation and opportunities. Yet, in many companies the power dynamics is inverted: Anything non-trivial has to go through legal and is blocked by default. Why don't new deployments have to go through security?

It's a great point, and largely due to legal teams speak a really similar language to business teams, just looking at it from different sides of the same apple. As nearly every company goes digital, security can fall in that same legal bucket.

Why does legal succeed then? Partially, there are pretty firm laws covering risk, that haven't quite caught up to sec breaches and such (but this is clearly beginning).

However, the big reason: Legal can explain the 'so what' because of that shared common language. Sec folks seem to largely not bother learning how to translate tech jargon to 120 seconds and a power point slide or two that business can understand.

> Why doesn't legal have to fight the same fights?

Legal constantly fights the same fights. They get those systems put in place because they acknowledge that fighting these fights is a critical aspect of their job and they make sure those control points are in place. Before I became an InfoSec PM I consulted for legal departments to fight those internal fights for them. They’ve had decades to refine and develop best practices around how to do these things.

Also places where everything is blocked by default by legal are generally badly run legal departments and have plenty of handshake agreements and covert business activity going on the same way places with intransigent and uncooperative InfoSec or enterprise architecture ends up with tons of shadow IT. They’ve been moving towards automated review and self-service tools to speed things up for a while now.

Yes, nailed it.

Mgmt/non-sec care about pretty clear, often profit-oriented metrics (ROI, etc.). There is such a clear precedent for successfully internally selling, implementing, and creating buy-in for cost-producing (i.e. infosec) but business-saving practices. Insurance, financial risk departments, legal departments etc. etc. etc. Sec can fall under that too. Sec people don't bother to learn the language 90% of the time. Sec people then burn out because they feel they're paddling nowhere.

Failure to learn that ^ language as a sec eng, means you fail to learn how to successfully implement sec in a way that has lasting buy-in. It's doable. It takes a bit of leadership, a bit of buzzword-learning.

If you want to play ball with mgmt and not be a mindless keyboard monkey sec eng who has no care if people care about sec or not, you must be able to take all those sec thoughts, distill it into 3 power point slides and 120 seconds of 'so what,' and be ok doing it over and over.

I work as a contractor for a bank.

A few months ago everybody was up in arms about a "major" security issue discovered by an auditor (you could see the settings of random users by changing an id in a url). I've just shown them you can credit money to your account, yet this is low priority and they provided a fix that I'm 100% percent sure didn't fix anything, unfortunately the functionality is down on all but the production environment. I'm tempted to just credit myself 1 monetary unit in production and just show them the statement.

Sometimes it matters who finds the issue more than what it is....

> I'm tempted to just credit myself 1 monetary unit in production and just show them the statement.

I would be tempted too, though I could bet that this will be a termination of an employment, instead of the problem being fixed.

I would like to be proven wrong on this speculation..

Not just that, I would expect criminal charges to follow.

Yes, that's what I thought as well.I'll just have to suck it up until the test environments are up again and provide a proof of concept exploit.

I'm just impatient because it's a really clever and somewhat complex hack that challenges some multi-threading and transactionability assumptions some people mande and I can't really talk about it(which I'd love to share with my peers).

Raducule, did you did CYA (cover your ass)? E-mail(s) to higher ups responsible in case of a fuck-up that most likely will happen in the future? Do it now if you didn't, or "wave and smile" if you did. Let them burn if you are ignored, no longer your problem.

Debit yourself 1 monetary unit, and then say you could just as easily credit money.

Not to downplay the issue in question, but you have to be realistic about prioritazation. An exploit of "if I change variable in URL I can see other people data" trumps "if I make multiple concurrent requests with specific input I can give myself monies". I guess not by much, depending on the complexity involved and the know how required to carry one vs the other. Another thing all together is who reported the issue - sometimes it's more of a PR experience, depending on the company

Never to yourself. Maybe to a board member. Or all of the board members. But that's a big maybe.

And make sure your contract covers your ass, under production system testing / penetration, or something similar.

I could only exploit this for my own account, and there are only money involved, if it was human lives at stake, I would not have worked at anything else until the issue was fixed.

The bug that lead to me discovering the security issue was mitigated by another developer, the security issue was also deemed fixed, I am 100% it was not, but there's no way to proove it at the moment, except u production, that's why I said I was tempted to actually do it.

Anyway, there's nothing much to gain by me by antagonising another coleague, the management or the bank. It's not worth the ego boost or frustration scratch, worst case scenario, I don't patch the issue in time and the bank looses money and they start taking security more seriously.

You'd get much less reprimand if this information was somehow leaked to someone else who then was stupid enough to do it, although to avoid any legal "abetting" you'd have to have some actual documented cya saying "don't mess with this broken feature".

I don't have any ill feelings against the bank or the management, it's just a stupid setup where the local prophet gets ignored, we are swamped with bugs, new business features, new regulatory features, outdated devops, a lot of teams scrambling to catch the monthly release, understaffed qa, non-functional test environments and so on.

I can understand every piece of the long string of factors that lead to this ridiculous situation where such a serious security issue is not being addressed; any one in particular is not ridiculous, but they all compound to the ridiculous of the end result.

I've fixed another ridiculous security issue in the recent past without making big waves, where only one software architect understood the seriousness of just one option in a maven config file(a whole declarative security module was not being weaved into the bytecode because somone added another module and instead of both being applied, only the most recent one was being applied).

That might be true, but hacking without explicit consent is a good way to get fired with potential jail time.

Conversely, in a lot of industries the security department is only there to prevent you from doing everything you need to do, even if the threat and attack surface are both minimal.

Agreed, too often security people are incentivised to make a massive fuss over tiny issues, and then often don't seem to understand that security is just one of many requirements needing to balanced

So much this. In addition, these tiny issues are often purely technical in nature. I still have to meet the first security engineer who is able to identify informations security risks at the business level and view vulnerabilities in their proper context.

So true! Security people think the end goal of the company is a secure system. No. The end goal of the company is a product that customers want to buy. And it's hard to build said product when security hinders you at every turn.

I've heard from someone selling security products that some companies prefer to pay ransonware to a hacker, instead of investing in building up their defense and paying for security products

The easiest security investment is to switch your shop from Windows, cutting like 98% of threats out there cold.

As well as cutting 98% of your workforce as no office employee knows how to work on anything different.

> As well as cutting 98% of your workforce as no office employee knows how to work on anything different.

Techies repeating this should take a lot of the blame for why Windows still sell as well as it does.

A 50 year old electrician convinced me to start using Ubuntu 13 years ago after someone at his kids elementary school or something had told him.

UX wise Linux passed Windows in many areas around the time Ubuntu was introduced.

The only reasons now are prefererence, hard dependencies on Windows only software, stubbornness and incomptence.

Only the two first ones are good reason in my opinion.

> UX wise Linux passed Windows in many areas around the time Ubuntu was introduced.

Is this something you decided on your own was a fact? If I disagree, would I be wrong, stubborn and/or incompetent?

Probably under stubbornness. Whatever good things Windows has going, it's not the UI.

I didn't say that. I disagreed with the statement of fact that Linux had passed Windows UX-wise in many ways around 2004.

Also, I wouldn't conflate UI and UX.

So would a few areas be true for you? "many" has ben true for 25 years for me and 15 years for many end users I know. UX is very much an opinion.

> UX is very much an opinion.

I'm certainly not going to object to you having that view, but if that's how you see it then it's not a very interesting discussion is it? Would be like discussing whether the Beatles were better than the Rolling Stones "in many ways".

For what it's worth, I believe you are very wrong. But I understand and kind of appreciate this view, largely because it keeps me employed.

I've worked in the field as a professional since around that time and as an amateur since 1995.

Things Linux did better at that time:

- installation experience, os: installation of a "pre-installed" Windows laptop could take up to 4 hours before you had finished completely.

- installation experience, additional software: I was good at removing Windows spyware and adware back when that was a local problem. Never had any Linux user with that it problem.

- driver issues: 50/50, since around that time hardware would mostly "just work" unlike Windows were one would typically, again at that time, have to hunt around the Internet or dive for the cd. Reason why Linux don't win hands down was because if something wasn't supported it would often be a dead end until next distro release, sometimes longer.

- end user support, other ux issues: the same, which means Linux probably win with a comfortable margin since Windows had the benefit of everyone "knowing it" and still didn't come out way ahead.

- in addition Linux typically is faster, even to this day, which is a huge issue with some users.

You might have noted I wrote in many areas, not all.

For users who earn their livelihood with Autocad and Photoshop I'll have a hard time recommending Linux. Same goes for people who have tried Linux for a few weeks and still don't like it. It might be preference or it might be stubbornness, I don't care.

But blanket statements like the one I replied to:

> As well as cutting 98% of your workforce as no office employee knows how to work on anything different.

is just plain wrong. The fails here are mostly related to other issues, not dumb users. (I really don't like that idea that all users are so stupid they cannot change adapt.)

And of your productivity for those tied to excel, word, and powerpoint

https://products.office.com/en-us/mac/microsoft-office-for-m...

Excel for Mac does not support multiple cores and has a much more limited set of hotkeys, along with a more limited universe of addons.

this. I think most office workers couldn't care less if they run Windows. But they know those Excel hotkeys as well as any Vim hacker knows the escape key.

As a vim to excel user I’ve always wanted to create an addon that maps vim hotkeys to excel. My only fear is that I’d get too used to it and not be able to use any machine that I sit down at.

LibreOffice.

LibreOffice has come a long way, but retraining thousands of employees is impractical.

That is as they say "a brave choice"

My job switched completely to GSuite a year ago, management first.

If anyone needs Excel they get it.

So far I've spotted I one person that probably uses Excel. No complaints that I've heard or seen.

Ah so how do you handle working with external people who use excel.

Most of my work with a wildly spread organisations and we can have excel go through US to Russia to Uk Back to Ukraine and then back to me in the UK

Those products in Wine. Google web, office 365, libre/open office, atom/sublime, vim/emacs.

Most of the workforce would have little trouble working on Macs or using Office365.

The actual friction will come from Windows sysadmins with no other practical skills.

I agree with the sentiment but this is probably not the case as a sysadmin hardly has any say in this usually. (I've been a sysadmin at software companies for 10 years.)

Um mate slashdot is over here http://slashdot/

So much this. The problem is mostly that this requires executive buy in, and clear explanation of the cost shift associated. Then, even after executive buy in, you have to guard against CISSP "windows on everything" saboteurs who know the C-speak better than you do, not to mention the people who want a vendor product for everything instead of just using industry standard FOSS tooling. To me, there is a lot of market opportunity here, but the MBA side is behind and so the implementation is lagging.

This is why I think one of the key things is in stack standardization (choose best in class foss tools that match requirements, for example, I personally have a gpl or gpl compat requirement), and stack size reduction (which means you don't need every fancy sounding tool that you hear about, make sure the use case is justified first).

People have such a stockholm syndrome relationship with MS (and proprietary sw in general) it's absolutely sickening. For example, I think educational institutions should be teaching and using FOSS first.

Some will whine about no one using linux or not knowing how, and one response I use is "you had to learn how to use windows too, and even it changes things up, just look at 7 to 8/10, so why not learn to use gnu/linux and free yourself from MS?"

I'm studying infosec, so I lean on the "pay for infosec people" side.

But from a company's perspective, if they have to pay 1M for an infosec team over five years, or 1M for a breach once every 5 years, what's the difference? You're still paying the same amount of money.

And then Equifax gets breached.

When does infosec start to realize that it's not just about company costs/risks, but the lives of all those users who are going to get screwed when your 'low risk = cheap fix' mentality pays off?

I'm in the Equifax breach (like sooooo many more)... part of my 'general concerns about the world' is whether/when I get my life hacked and have to rebuild.

Let me know where you get hired next, so I can take my business elsewhere.

Corporations do not care one bit for

> lives of all those users

Equifax cares about one thing: earning profits for its shareholders. They got caught with their pants down. Now other companies can look and try to estimate their expected cost of being breached (probability of being breached multiplied by the dollar cost) vs the dollar cost to upgrade their IT systems, infrastructure, management, company policies, etc etc etc. Realistically, Equifax is probably incapable of doing the necessary changes upfront without a complete overhaul of it's people and leadership structure.

The vast majority of companies will spend the least amount of money possible to pretend that they fixed the problem.

You want companies to care? Then create regulation that protects

> lives of all those users

Perhaps they consider that the employees will be way more productive without all the security barriers that the Infosec team would set up, so paying for the breach is a net gain in this light.

You will be paying more for the second breach and paying once will get you put on the sucker list so others will see you as a easy mark to hack.

That sentiment reminds me of how most people think of accessibility.

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