Get Over It…

A whole lotta people cryin’ “Don’t blame me”
They point their crooked little fingers at everybody else
Spend all their time feelin’ sorry for themselves
Victim of this, victim of that
Your momma’s too thin; your daddy’s too fat

Get over it” – Get Over It by The Eagles

     Some of the most true lyrics for these times. Everyone wants things fixed, no one is willing to own up to their mistakes. Security is an illusion.

     There is a group, that professes to be all about our security. We hate them. They have put up barriers, slowed us down, made us uncomfortable. They have shown that they can’t do their job, stuff gets through, we are not much more secure with them around. The watch us, scan us, stop us from having things with us that we feel we need. Still, we are no more secure. They limit access, have special lanes, and can be invasive all in the name of better security. Yet we are still vulnerable. It is a show, security is an illusion.

   Yes, I’m talking about the TSA in the previous paragraph, but think about it. I could very easily be talking about our industry, information security. We all know there is no way to make us 100% secure. so we posture, put out new products and still get pwned. We make the end users life more difficult. This world keeps accelerating, first to market is the thing. The end user doesn’t really care about security though. They want it, yes, but they don’t want to think about it. Instead though, products that might be superior security wise tend to not be popular. Why? Simple, first to market is first to market. Unless that first to market item has some super major usability issue to it (see Android 1) or is priced too high (the original Windows PDA phones), first to market is hard to dethrone.

   What do we, our community of infosec professionals and hobbyists do about this? We berate, we laugh, we joke and we act superior. Now we are even doing that among ourselves. We are the jerks, and that jerkishness doesn’t help, it hinders. We are not educating the end users. Yes it is their fault, but it isn’t. they shouldn’t have to worry about the security of computers, networks, IoT, and other devices. They have to though because of first to market. We have to educate them to care, and we have to figure out a way of taking our snark out of the process. to empower them to make the choice for the better, more secure product. Then we might start seeing companies trying to bake better security into devices from the start.

   I mentioned us being jerks to each other. that needs to calm down also. doing that is a good way to scare people away from becoming part of the solution. Who wants to work and deal with jerks? Yeah, we can snark, but we need to know when and where to use it. We need to be more welcoming for new people and more understanding of each other. As our industry becomes more and more compartmentalized, we need to work more and more on our soft skills. We need each other, because not a single one of us can know it all.

   Security is an illusion, yes, but we can make things more secure than they were. We just need to get our heads on straight and stop being the problem.