Mm, it can become that. It's important to get a pentest from a reputable firm. At the one I worked at, it was a point of pride to come up with clever attacks. We'd make a sport of it and try to one-up each other. But it's easy to imagine some other pentest firm just going through the motions, running Nessus and calling it a day.
Unfortunately, that's where money really does make a difference. $40k is at the low end of how absurdly expensive pentests are. Yet they make all the difference -- one app that I pentested was at a trading firm. I took that app from "typing ' leads to SQLi in their Node backend," and "there was SQLi in their Java backend if you were clever" to "you'd have to be more clever than me if you want to breach this app."
Most attacks come from unsophisticated adversaries. This implies that raising the bar higher than these guys gets you 80% of the way home. The other 20% is much harder, but it's doable if your company has a culture of caring about security.
> If a CISO can come up with a list of controls that he/she is comfortable with, then by and large the evidence proves that those controls are working effectively and are going to satisfy the elements of any framework that you use.
These are two soundbites from an interview with Susan Mauldin from over a year ago. Someone didn't want us to hear them, according to the timeline[1] of when someone remembered and reported that these interviews happened on September 9, and how soon after (on September 10) they were taken down (and then late last night, at least partially recovered again, further on down in this very HN thread!)
They are not even especially damning soundbites if you put them out of context and honestly evaluate them in a vacuum, but it does put some additional context on "it was due to third party code" and in the context of this whole discussion, it is clear why someone did not want us to see this interview.
If the job of the CISO is to deliver the project under budget and on time, rather than to do the job correctly as you and I understand it, then we are certainly more likely to find ourselves in this position. So let's keep having these discussions and make it better! It is absolutely your codebase and my codebase, we are all in this kind of trouble (or, we could be... if we all similarly had 140 million involuntary "customers" entrusting us with their SSNs and credit histories.)
[1]: https://www.hollywoodlanews.com/equifax-chief-security-offic...
The same fault is responsible for the Space Shuttle Columbia crash. It's called "leadership without vision." If you put a manager in place and give them tight constraints on how they deliver the product, they will almost universally deliver a critically flawed product ... albeit, on time and under budget.
Know what happens when you demonize something? People stop reporting it.
Look at the actual damage to actual people. You are arguing for prison time for the execs, if I remember correctly. Yet it's unclear that a single person has yet been materially damaged by these leaks. If you want to suck away N years of someone's life, you have a higher bar to clear.
I haven't commented on the Equifax incident, so you're confusing me for someone else. I don't have an opinion one way or the other on criminal negligence.
How do we incentivize (or regulate?) companies to do a better job handling confidential data?
A note of "Well, let's not be too hasty" would seem to be in order.
Part of the problem is that security breaches matter, but they don't matter. It's like the negative externality of factory pollution. One day perhaps the effects will become visible, but this disaster is about as bad as you can get and it's still not obvious that a lot of people are going to lose anything significant from the breach. If someone wanted to impersonate you, they can usually find a way already.
Of course, if the 140M SSNs become public, that will change the situation completely. Possibly even for the better: then we'd finally stop relying on them to be secret when they were never designed to be.
Believe it or not, the situation now is drastically better than it was a decade ago. People care about getting pentests now. You can grudgingly force a company to fork over the money.
One of the best ways to get companies to become more secure is to force them. Most of the companies who were being pentested didn't want to be; they were forced to, because some other business refused to do business with them until they produced a document stating they were reasonably secure. This special document is only obtainable from a security firm; hence, pentests happen, and the world is marginally more secure.
I don't doubt that there are other Equifaxes out there, nor do I doubt that there will be more leaks. But this wasn't a simple matter of a horrible code base. Heck, the leak wasn't even due to Equifax code, it was due to third party code. Other companies of Equifax's size apparently do better. Equifax should have done better, and I'll bet if the penalties for losing this data were more severe, would have done better.