I don’t like bounty programs. We need Good Samaritan laws that legally protect and reward white hats. Rewards that pay the bills and not whatever big tech companies have in their couch cushions.
Show me the incentives, and I'll show you the outcomes.
We really need to make security liabilities to be just that: liabilities. If you are running 20+ year-old code, and you get hacked, you need to be fined in a way that will make you reconsider security as a priority.
Also, you need to be liable for all of the disruption that the security breach caused for customers. No, free credit monitoring does not count as recompense.
Why is it inherently desirable that society penalize companies that get hacked above and beyond people choosing not to use their services, or selling off their shares, etc?
It'd be one thing if these were isolated incidents, but they're not.
Furthermore, the methods you mention simply aren't effective. Our economy is now so consolidated that many markets only have a handful of participants offering goods or services, and these players often all have data and computer security issues. As for divestiture, most people don't own shares, and those who do typically don't know they own shares of a specific company. Most shareholders in the US are retirement or pension funds, and they are run by people who would rather make it impossible for the average person to bring real consequences to their holdings for data breaches, than cause the company to spend money on fixing the issues that allow for the breaches to begin with. After all, it's "cheaper".
It's never made sense to me.
I can see that being true in specific instances: many people in the US don't have great mobility for residential ISPs, or utility companies. And there's large network effects for social media platforms. But if any significant plurality of users cared about the impact of service breaches, or bad privacy policies, surely we'd see the impact somewhere in the market? We do in some related areas: Apple puts a ton of money into marketing about keeping people's data and messages private. WhatsApp does the same. But there are so many companies out there, lots of them have garbage security practices, lots of them get compromised, and I'm struggling to remember any example of a consumer company that had a breach and saw any significant impact.
To pick an example: in 2014 Home Depot had a breach of payment data. Basically everywhere that has Home Depots also has Lowes and other options that sell the same stuff. In most places, if you're pissed at Home Depot for losing your card information, you can literally drive across the street to Lowes. But it doesn't seem like that happened.
Is it possible that outside of tech circles where we care about The Principle Of The Thing, the market is actually correct in its assessment of the value for the average consumer business of putting more money into security?
> To pick an example: in 2014 Home Depot had a breach of payment data. Basically everywhere that has Home Depots also has Lowes and other options that sell the same stuff. In most places, if you're pissed at Home Depot for losing your card information, you can literally drive across the street to Lowes. But it doesn't seem like that happened.
No one considers these things when they're buying plumbing tape. Really, you shouldn't have to consider that. You should be able to do commerce without having to wonder if some guy on the other side of the transaction is going to get his yearly bonus by cutting the necessary resources to keep you from having to deal with identity theft.
> Is it possible that outside of tech circles where we care about The Principle Of The Thing, the market is actually correct in its assessment of the value for the average consumer business of putting more money into security?
Let's try with a company that has your data and see how correct "the market" is. Principles are the things you build a functioning society upon, not quarterly returns.
What do you mean? Tons of companies with my data have been breached.
Plenty of my normie friends don't want new cars for example due to all the tracking and subscription garbage, but realistically, what can you do when the old ones slowly get outlawed/impossible to maintain due to part shortages.
What does this even mean? How is the a government going to do a better job valuing and scoring exploits than the existing market?
I'm genuinely curious about how you suggest we achieve
> Rewards that pay the bills and not whatever big tech companies have in their couch cushions.
So far, the industry has tried bounty programs. High-tier bugs are impossible to value and there is too much low-value noise, so the market converges to mediocrity, and I'm not sure how having a government run such a program (or set reward tiers, or something) would make this any different.
And, the industry and governments have tried punitive regulation - "if you didn't comply with XYZ standard, you're liable for getting owned." To some extent this works as it increases pay for in-house security and makes work for consulting firms. This notion might be worth expanding in some areas, but just like financial regulation, it is a double edged sword - it also leads to death-by-checkbox audit "security" and predatory nonsense "audit firms."
For the rewards part: again, the companies who don't have a shit won't incentivise white hat pentesting. If a company has a security hole that leads to disclosure of sensitive information, it should be fined, and such fines can be used for rewards.
This creates an actual market for penetration testing that includes more than just the handful of big tech companies willing to participate. It also puts companies legally on the hook for issues before a security disaster occurs, not after it's already happened.
> If a company has a security hole that leads to disclosure of sensitive information, it should be fined
What's a "security hole"? How do you determine the fines? Where do you draw the line for burden of responsibility? If someone discovers a giant global issue in a common industry standard library, like Heartbleed, or the Log4J vulnerability, and uses it against you first, were you responsible for not discovering that vulnerability and mitigating it ahead of time? Why?
> such fines can be used for rewards.
So we're back to the award allocation problem.
> This creates an actual market for penetration testing that includes more than just the handful of big tech companies willing to participate.
Yes, if you can figure out how to determine the value of a vulnerability, the value of a breach, and the value of a reward.
It's pretty clear whatever security 'strategy' we're using right now doesn't work. I'm subscribed to Troy Hunt's breach feed and it's basically weekly now that another 10M, 100M records are leaked. It seems foolish to continue like this. If governments want to take threats seriously a new strategy is needed that mobilises security experts and dishes out proper penalties.
My goal was to learn whether there was an insight beyond "we should take the thing that doesn't work and move it into the government where it can continue to not work," because I'd find that interesting.
There's a reason Good Samaritan laws are built around rendering aid to injured humans: there is no equivalent if you go down the street popping peoples' car hoods to refill their windshield wiper fluid.
What proposed regulation could address a current failure to value bugs in the existing market?
The parent post suggested regulation as a solution for:
> Rewards that pay the bills and not whatever big tech companies have in their couch cushions.
I don't know how this would work and am interested in learning.