Comment by EnigmaFlare | Hacker News Reader

Comment by EnigmaFlare | Hacker News Reader

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I agree with her about blaming developers, not hackers. Though not to the point of liability for all developers, but maybe for a few specialist professionals who take on that responsibility and are paid appropriately for it.

Hackers are essentially a force of nature that will always exist and always be unstoppable by law enforcement because they can be in whatever country doesn't enforce such laws. You wouldn't blame the wind for destroying a bridge - it's up to the engineer to expect the wind and make it secure against that. Viewing them this way makes it clear that the people responsible for hacks are the developers in the same way developers are responsible for non-security bugs. Blame is only useful if you can actually use it to alter people's behavior - which you can't for international hackers, or the wind.

Banging this drum could be effective if it leads to a culture change. We already see criticism of developers of software that has obvious vulnerabilities all the time on HN, so there's already some sense that developers shouldn't be extremely negligent/incompetent around security. You can't guarantee security 100% of course, but you can have a general awareness that it's wrong to make the stupid decisions that developers keep making and are generally known to be bad practice.

Developers build insecure software in part because themselves and in part because of the decisions made by their managers up to the CEO.

So when you write "developers" we must read "software development companies".

Yes, that's what I meant too, sorry.

> I agree with her about blaming developers, not hackers.

They are clearly called "villains".

Wind isn't a person capable of controlling their actions. There is no intention to do harm. They aren't senseless animals either. Yes, it's developers' fault if a product isn't secure enough, but it's also not wrong to put blame on those actively exploiting that. Let's not stop blaming those who do wrong --- and that kind of hackers is doing wrong, not just the developers "making stupid decisions".

Those aren't mutually exclusive

> They are clearly called "villains".

As readers of the article know, they are not:

> The truth is: Technology vendors are the characters who are building problems" into their products, which then "open the doors for villains to attack their victims,"

She’s talking about companies, not individual developers, and she didn’t call them villains but rather creators of the problems actual villains exploit. The company focus is important: it’s always easy to find who committed a problematic line of code - say a kernel driver which doesn’t validate all 21 of its arguments properly - but the person who typed that in doesn’t work alone. The company sets their incentives, provides training (or not), and most importantly should be pairing the initial author of that code with reviewers, testers, and quality tools. When a company makes a $50 toaster, they don’t just ask the designer whether they think it’s safe, they actually test it in a variety of ways to get that UL certification, and we have far fewer fires than we had a hundred years ago.

One key to understanding this is to remember CISA’s scope and mission. They’re looking at a world where every week has new ransomware attacks shutting down important businesses, even things like hospitals, industrial espionage is on the rise and the industry has largely tried to stay in the cheaper reactive mode of shipping patches after problems are discovered rather than reducing the rate of creating them. This is fundamentally not a technical issue but an economic one and she’s trying to change the incentive structure to get out of the cycle which really isn’t working.

> put blame on those actively exploiting that

To some extent hackers are like the wind. They're a nebulous cloud of unidentifiable possible-people that you can't influence through shaming or laws or anything else. I think we should see them that way to make it clear that it's primarily the developer's responsibility.

Of course blame hackers when they're within reach too.

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