> "we've implemented all best practices, contracted out the hard parts to world-renowned experts, and had third party audits to verify that - there was nothing more we could do, therefore it's not our fault"

The amount of (useless) processes/systems at banks I've seen in my career that boil down to this is incredible, e.g. hundreds of millions spent on call center tech for authentication that might do nothing, but the vendor is "industry-leading" and "best in-class".

> It's just that understanding this explains a lot of paradoxes of cybersecurity as a field. It all makes much more sense when you realize it's primarily about liability management, not about hat-wearing hackers fighting other hackers with differently colored hats.

Bingo. The same situation for most risk departments at banks or healthcare fraud and insurance companies.

I thought risk at a bank was going to be savvy quants, but it's literally lawyers/compliance/box-checking marketing themselves as more sophisticated than they are. Like the KYC review for products never actually follow up and check if the KYC process in the new products works. There's no analytics, tracking, etc. until audit/regulators come in an ask, "our best-in-class vendor handles this". All the systems are implemented incorrectly, but it doesn't matter because the system is built by a vendor and implemented by consultants, and they hold the liability (they don't, but it will take ~5 years in court to get to that point).

Beginning to understand what "bureaucracy" mechanically is.