> 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.