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Comment by ineedasername | Hacker News Reader

That assumes all cyber threats can be averted by private corporations. It's difficult for a company to play effective defense against nation-state levels of cyber attack R&D. Yes, companies need better security than they have now, but they cant do it without help.

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This is where the threat of retaliation comes in as a deterrent, and the country should be equipped to do so. But publicly subsidizing private cybersecurity is both impractical (how would that work exactly?) and would encourage underspending even further.

Why do you think China or Russia prefer to hack foreign private competitors rather than sending a bunch of missiles on their infrastructure?

We publicly subsidize every other kind of security to some degree already. A company might have security guards, but police are certainly going to be there to provide a baseline policing the neighborhood, respond to calls, etc.

And security via threat of retaliation does not sound like a practical or effective solution either: we already have plenty of capabilities in that area, and it didn't stop east coast oil & gas infrastructure from going down or a sizeable portion of the nation's meat processing from going the same way. These attacks are escalating rapidly, and relying in the free market to find a solution doesn't look like it's going to happen fast enough.

This needs to be a national, not (just) a private corporate issue because of the enormous national security implications involved in cyber attacks against infrastructure. When a single company's security failure can cause national chaos, there needs to be a nation-level approach to this.

Then how about nationalizing that infrastructure, if it is so crucial for national security and the private sector is unwilling to spend enough to protect itself against threats? Let's not kid ourselves: this is first and foremost a matter of incentives and consequences rather than a lack of capabilities.

I don't see what the public could do better than private entities, besides absorbing their costs. The only way I can see it practically working is if the private sectors would allow government entities full access to their IT infrastructure, submit themselves to random controls, audits and checks, and bear sizeable fines if they're found to be negligent.

The government could set & enforce standards for levels of security and disaster recovery, especially if critical systems. It could not just research but also pass on knowledge of vulnerabilities. I don't expect the government to actually run the security. I expect the government to provide the framework and tools so that everyone doesn't have to figure it out on their own.

Yes thank you for your responses. People wine but we're clearly pathetic as an industry, limping along with Unix etc. We know so much about how to build better systems, and yet it's more bandages on the status quo, all the while increasing complexity which makes things largely futile.

Unlike "real war", cyber defense also gets to design the battlefield, everytime time. There will always be social attacks, but the stupid C and Unix stuff that is the bread & butter today is completely preventable

The feds can’t even secure all their own systems. We had the OPM hack which resulted in the personal information of federal employees exfultrated who knows where. Also the federal government were still using passwords that were exposed in the breach 3 years after https://www.forbes.com/sites/leemathews/2018/11/15/office-of....

Tbh I trust the FAANG companies to run better security. Government is incompetent in this area.

Many times it's not the government securing their systems, they've outsourced it to places like SolarWinds. Maybe they would do a better job if political pressure didn't push for more and more privatization of critical operations.

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