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Comment by t3rabytes | Hacker News Reader

More info in a directive from 1/14/24, https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/directives/ed-24-01-mitigat...:

> CISA has observed widespread and active exploitation of vulnerabilities in Ivanti Connect Secure and Ivanti Policy Secure solutions, hereafter referred to as “affected products.” Successful exploitation of the vulnerabilities in these affected products allows a malicious threat actor to move laterally, perform data exfiltration, and establish persistent system access, resulting in full compromise of target information systems.

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> Agencies running the affected products must assume domain accounts associated with the affected products have been compromised.

This looks like a right shitshow.

Ross Anderson did a big group research "The Changing Cost of Cybercrime" [0]. I forget the number but it came out at several trillion.

After Solarwinds and the UK Horizon Post Office scandal I am wondering, how does cybercrime compare against simple incompetence and hopelessly broken software engineering? How can we measure that to see just how bad things really are?

[0] https://weis2019.econinfosec.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/...

question is cyclical because cyber crime doesn't exist without incompetence.

There's very little cyber crime that happens by bribing someone. Most of it is just walking past an open door.

> How can we measure that to see just how bad things really are?

hence, cost of incompetence = cost of all cybercrime + n.

Cyber crime definitely exists without incompetence.

Defense is a costly vast landscape compared to attacking. Sure incompetence causes issues and major drives my blood pressure, but the problem doesn’t go away if incompetence goes away.

> Defense is a costly vast landscape compared to attacking

Yes. But.

There are many defensive tactics that are not free but are cheap.

Keeping system software updated is one

https://infosec.exchange/@wdormann/111880313720252008

It's interesting when you put it that way.

In the Horizon case, and no doubt in many cases to come, the crime is committed by a company against the public. They tried to pass it off as incompetence, and blame "systems" but I expect the public enquiry will lead to criminal proceedings against Fujitsu now.

Big companies may laugh at fines for treating their customers badly, but I hope to see many more ruinously brought to book for their criminal incompetence.

> hence, cost of incompetence = cost of all cybercrime + n.

Where n is at least as large as the other part. Scary!

> There's very little cyber crime that happens by bribing someone

If competence was the norm the bribes, violence, etc. become the preferred tactics

This is a really excellent point.

Someone on Bruce Schniere's site noted that about the Anderson study... that the increase in cyber-crime perfectly tracks the decrease in street crime. As online fraud goes up, robberies go down.

If crime remains a constant then having shitty software security is a safety valve - and fixing computer security means physical crime would rise again.

Interesting hypothesis.

I don't think we can ever really "fix computer security" because there's so much software being written all the time by just about anyone and the demand keeps growing.

Hacking computers is usually just a means to an end: fraud or theft. Competence is more than just preventing hacks.

> I don't think we can ever really "fix computer security"

But we can do much better

This sort of implies the street criminals become cyber criminals, which seems to not be a matching skill set. Call me skeptical of the study I admittedly haven't read.

> This sort of implies the street criminals become cyber criminals,

Does it? I never considered that. It seems obvious to me that they aren't the same actual people.

We have more EV cars on the road displacing ICE vehicles, but that doesn't imply that the old cars "transformed" into electric ones.

You literally wrote "If crime remains a constant then having shitty software security is a safety valve" - so there is some implication otherwise how would that work? Why would crime become constant? If these are two different groups of people, why don't we have increase in both? This explanation seems too simplistic to me.

I can only respond to the part of your question that is coherent to me. The "how would that work?" part feels ill-formed and something I've already answered.

But "Why would crime become constant?" is very interesting. For that we turn to "criminology" [0,1]. Roughly, there are three "layers", biological, psychological and sociological. All of these are either fixed, or very slow and hard to change.

Indeed the biggest factors in "how much crime there is" are laws and reporting, how visible the crime is. Obviously we could make crime disappear overnight by declaring all behaviours legal. Really, the justice system can only absorb and respond to what the underlying social and economic conditions set.

Most crimes are resource motivated [2]. Violent crime makes headlines, ruins lives, changes votes and is generally undesirable. "Soft" crimes are less visible and have less impact, especially when they are against actors that are so immensely wealthy they do not even care (for example big-tech companies that see huge fines as simply the cost of doing business as usual)

When we have a fixed pool of criminal potential (set by these structural conditions), which would you choose as a new criminal entering the "market"?

And not surprisingly, Pew Research polls showed "violent and property crimes declined by 51% and 54%, respectively, between 1993 and 2018."

Therefore the hypothesis I was curious about was whether Removing the opportunity for cyber crime (via better security) would have the unintended side effect of shifting crime back into physical robbery and theft with its attendant violence.

What do you think?

[0] https://www.britannica.com/science/criminology/Major-concept...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminology

[2] https://online.maryville.edu/blog/types-of-crimes/

If I understand your point correctly (I'm trying to solve the "crime rate is constant but these are not the same people" conundrum), we assume there is a fixed pool of criminal potential, with some of these people inclined more to violent crime and others for soft crime, and today we have more favorable conditions toward the latter. If so, I'd arrive to the opposite conclusion: if, instead of removing the opportunity for cyber crime, we also relaxed laws related to violent crime, cyber crime wouldn't magically dwindle trying to stick to some magical constant, because even though the pool might be more or less stable, the types of people for both are mostly different.

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