The idea that the spending needs to grow linearly with the growth is a damning indictment of the mindset of the vast ineffectual mess that is the cybersecurity industry.
Cybersecurity is not about stopping issues but about compliance and liability. Attend RSA once, and you will see it yourself.
Basic hygiene security hygiene pretty much removes ransomware as a threat.
It does not. The problem is, as long as there are people employed in a company, there will be people being too trustful and executing malware, not to mention AI agents. And even if you'd assume people and AI agents were perfect, there's all the auto updaters these days that regularly get compromised because they are such juicy targets.
And no, backups aren't the solution either, they only limit the scope of lost data.
In the end the flaw is fundamental to all major desktop OS'es - neither Windows, Linux nor macOS meaningfully limit the access scope of code running natively on the filesystem. Everything in the user's home directory and all mounted network shares where the user has write permissions bar a few specially protected files/folders is fair game for any malware achieving local code execution.
Not applicable everywhere, but I think it's applicable most places.
The next step is just to move to security by design operating systems like ChromeOS where the user is not allowed to run any non-approved executables.
If tricking a single employee can cause an entire company to stall out, it's a process issue. Just like how a single employee should not be able to wire out $100,000.
But what I think you're concerned about (and I agree) is that the flip side of that is that giving device owners more control over their apps also gives the OS developers more control, and Google's interests are not always perfectly aligned with the device owner's. There's a much wider market for apps than there is for operating systems, so sometimes app developers' interests will actually be better aligned with the device owner's than the OS developer's interests are.
One possible saving grace here is AOSP. In theory you could have multiple competing AOSP-based desktop OSs, each catering to a slightly different set of users. This would be close to the ideal situation in my opinion. Either that or Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Ladybird all evolve into full fledged OSs with WASM-based apps.
The issue is how much power this gives to the vendors. I think we should be able to survive a vendor going poof, taking all our data with them. Having a general computing platform capable of mixing files and privileges seems to me like the only way of keeping this capability.
But yes, these are the practical problems we need to address.
This is very literally what 'basic hygiene prevents these problems' addresses. Ransomeware attacks have shown time and again that they way they were able to spread was highly over-permissioned users and services because that's the easy way to get someone to stop complaining that they can't do their job.
Basic security hygiene in the modern world is "assume your employees can be a threat", either because they're incompetent ("I accidentally deleted the shared spreadsheet, I thought it was my copy"), malevolent ("I will show them all!") or compromised ("I clicked a link in my email and now my computer is slow.")
If you aren't designing your systems to be robust against insider threats, they will fail.
(If you design them to be robust against insider threats, they will probably also fail, so you have to be constantly working to understand how to limit the consequences of any individual failure.)
Yes it does. A little bit of application control, network segmentation and credential hygiene (including phishing resistant MFA) go a long way.
> The problem is, as long as there are people employed in a company, there will be people being too trustful and executing malware,
Why are you letting employees execute arbitrary software in the first place? Application allowlisting, particularly on Windows is a well solved problem.
> not to mention AI agents.
Now this is possible only through criminal incompetence.
> And even if you'd assume people and AI agents were perfect, there's all the auto updaters these days that regularly get compromised because they are such juicy targets.
Relatively rare, likely to be caught by publisher rules in application control and even if not, if the compromise of a handful of endpoints can take down the entire business then you have some serious, systemic problems to solve.
> And no, backups aren't the solution either, they only limit the scope of lost data. In the end the flaw is fundamental to all major desktop OS'es - neither Windows, Linux nor macOS meaningfully limit the access scope of code running natively on the filesystem. Everything in the user's home directory and all mounted network shares where the user has write permissions bar a few specially protected files/folders is fair game for any malware achieving local code execution.
Why are you giving individual employees such broad access to so many file shares in the first place? We’re in basic hygiene territory again.
Now take limited time/budget and off you go making sure basic security hygiene is applied in a company with 500 employees or 100 employees.
If you can do that let’s see how it goes with 1000 employees.
A law firm with 50 employees who use nothing but Microsoft Word, Outlook and a SaaS practice management application is really easy to button up tight, though they probably don’t have any inhouse IT and the quality of MSPs varies wildly.
A company of 50 software developers is an enormous headache.
If so, I bristle at this way that many developers (not necessarily you, but generally) view security: "It's red or it's green."
Attack surface going up as the number of employees rises is expected, and the goal is to manage the risk in the portfolio, not to ensure perfect compliance, because you won't, ever.
I cant tell if you’re being flippant, or naive. There is nothing that removes any category of malware as a threat.
Sure, properly isolated backups that run often will mitigate most of the risks from ransomware, but it’s quite a reach to claim that it’s pretty much removed as a threat. Especially since you would still need to cleanup and restore.
The security industry absolutely has a serious "more is better" syndrome.
My favorite is the Gordon-Loeb model[0], but there are others that are simpler and some that are more complex. Almost none that imply the budget should naively grow in lockstep with prevelence linearly.
I think TFA doesnt really mean to imply that it should, merely that there is a likley mismatch.
Do you just expect one side to magically be more dollar-efficient than the other? I'm confused.