I've moved on. It's more important to focus on election security and physical security at this point. Infosec is dead. Five years ago Bruce Schneier wrote a book called "Carry On" now he has one called "Click Here to Kill Everybody".

Just five years.

We're in a technological growth feedback function and we're unable to predict it.

I struggle with being _comfortable_ with that idea, but I don't have a problem believing the technical accuracy of it.

The argument is that even if everybody has access to all information, only a small group is able to exploit that access effectively.

So, you still end up with a small group abusing their access to the information. You should therefore aim for privacy of sensitive information.

Technically, this is not taking advantage of any public information. It is just capturing images of things happening in public. Anyone could set up a camera and capture license plates as they drive through an intersection.

So is it totally fine for a police force to scan license plates at every intersection?

The question is complicated, because the effect on people changes when you do something that is not worrisome on a small scale in an automated way at a large scale. When you add in that the people doing it have a large amount of power over people and it changes it even more.

I’d imagine it would be relatively easy to figure out where someone works and/or lives and just go find them.

Correlating across multiple public databases might make things even easier.

But I don’t think this is the point of the argument. The point is that those in power can gain more benefit from the information than the general population.

Let’s say all votes in elections become public. That information is more useful to a powerful political party than to the public at large, or a small unfunded group. If you don’t want that information abused, the argument goes, you should make sure it’s kept private.

-- Yonatan Zunger, chief architect, Google+

https://plus.google.com/+YonatanZunger/posts/WegYVNkZQqq

Published in 1998, I think it's probably still the most fascinating work on privacy of the post-internet age.

More fun fictional explorations of the subject can be found in his novels Kiln People and Earth.

I asked them what protections they took against hacking, and they told me that nobody would be interested in what they do, so they didn't have to spend any money on protecting themselves.

https://www.businessinsider.com/hacker-us-nukes-report-2016-...

A counter-example is something like Stuxnet; that likely leapt an air gap, but it was exquisitely targeted for that scenario. I'd worry about this as a nuclear component manufacturer.

An ancient piece of air-gaped hardware is pretty bulletproof. I bet the NSA would have more trouble hacking it than a fully up to date install of <modern OS> that is on the Internet.

It's very possible the biggest threat vector is leaving the door unlocked.

[0] Which, why should we? The world has moles.

Anything with a network port was plugged into the lan, which was plugged into the free router that came with the business broadband package.

Which was also the only firewall and it was still on factory defaults other than the wireless password.

As far as I can tell this is more or less standard business practice in the small to medium enterprise sector here, which is to say, the vast majority of specialist engineering companies in the UK.

Inadvertent data breaches are inevitable.

The very best you could possibly do is access logs and auditing. Which of your customers do any kind of auditing?

I'm advocating Translucent Database techniques, where patient data is encrypted at the field and row (document) level. Much like a salted password file.

System level encryption still means the admins can still see the data. Therefore, breaches remain inevitable.

Translucent Databases http://a.co/d/5855TYO http://wayner.org/node/46

Think of how password databases don't actually store passwords. Instead they (should) be storing salted and hashed passwords.

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Please see my other comment about plaintext demographic data vs using unique identifiers.

Your conclusion is correct.

Medical records cannot be encrypted so long as demographic data must be stored in plaintext. Otherwise how would we do record matching (linking) across heterogenous systems?

The fix is to use universal identifiers. Once you moot the record matching problem, you can use translucent database techniques to anonymize patient data.

I don't expect the USA to adopt an official centralized universal identifier for people any time soon. And none of the 3rd party solutions (NSA, LexisNexus, ChoicePoint, Facebook, etc) are acceptable, for various reasons.

I mean, sure it has a cost, some of this stuff is new, but to say "cannot be encrypted"... that's where the fun is- working out how to do it.

Obviously, some admins/sres still need to have full access to the key store, but that can be a very small group, as compared to a situation where "every Gmail engineer can read every user's email".

Edit: on reading the summary blurb from the "translucent databases" book link that @specialist posted, what I described above is very much along those lines.

Everyone user on that site (99% male) was exposed as a complete chump -- it's still a functioning business ...

To me it says economic performance isn't everything, and I like that idea.

quick google: https://splinternews.com/ashley-madison-comes-clean-about-al...

The data is public now -- AM were blackmailed and didn't pay -- I guess you can take a sample of the email addresses and compare with public profiles that match the emails. There were virtually no women -- in fact they were so paranoid the men would realize there weren't any women to have extra marital affairs with they had -- bots -- that flirted now and again just to keep the men paying.

Plenty of reporting was done on it after the breach. I recall saying to people that this would be a good example of a breach that would destroy a company by exposing that it's value proposition was nothing. I guess I was very wrong.

I'm reminded of the entire "robot boyfriend/girlfriend" genre of TV/Movies/Comics from Japan/Korea, plus the "dating simulator" genre of video games. These are more fantasy-fulfillment, though.

I honestly think it would be a net good for society to have simulators/bots that teach people how to have real, healthy relationships with other humans. (There are anecdoates about kids with autism who became more verbal once they started talking to Siri or the Google Assistant, for example.) But I feel like working on or using such tools would probably be as stigmatized as sex toys in the near/medium term.

Also, their target audience is nominally married people. So either these people have a fetish for cheating (weird, but not my problem), or they already are in relationships of some sort of another. One would hope that a bit couldn’t teach them anything new at that point.

Or maybe the bots are so good they should just sell those as a service? Why bother chatting with a real woman when the bot experience is better? As I say this, why isn't it a thing already? Chatbot hookers. It has to be a thing already. The interactive experience for a fraction of the price. Or do camgirls set the price floor too low to make this viable?

It seems like our NLP AIs should be advanced enough to make a pretty compelling chatbots by now. People were fooled by Eliza 40 years ago. A lot of porn is pretty formulaic too, so getting the common case right shouldn't be that hard.

They paid some fines equivalent to what they make in profit every 13 hours. That's it. Nothing else.

If you're running a large profitable company why should you care about security at all? Why should you care about the rule of law at all? There is no accountability, there is no culpability, nobody will ever get in trouble.

I hate both Bank of America and Well's Fargo with a passion and the outcome of 2008 didn't dissuade my disgust at them. Unfortunately both hold loans from me that I did not initially originate with them.

I've started using Chase and Cap One online but they have zero branches in my entire city...

Of course, you can use checks, but sometimes you need hard cash (e.g., buying a used car).

I use "cashier's checks" [1] to buy used cars, since that still offers more security and convenience (of not handling physically bulky bundles of currency).

A trick I learned from reading sites about how to buy at real estate auctions (where the final price can't be known up front) is to use multiple checks made out to oneself, in varying amounts. The ones needed for payment can be endorsed over to the seller, and the remainder can be re-deposited.

My credit union will send me an effecitvely unlimited number of these through the mail, if they're requested through the automated system and each for a at least some (reasonable) minimum amount.

Still, your point holds. If you need it in a hurry, a physical branch is required.

[1] check drawn on the financial institution, not my personal account

Buy call options, that way if it doesn't go your way you're not out as much (in theory, anyway). Worked for me with Equifax and United Airlines, as two examples. Didn't work so well buying puts on Kodak when they announced crypto-whatever; market stayed irrational longer than the life of my contract.

Keeping in mind that the next Equifax might be the one that finally gets put against the wall.

I.e buying calls at 50% IV when you only expect a 30% move before expiry is... suboptimal.

In other words, there's no substitute for truly knowing what you're doing when trading options. (Learned this the hard way, AMA)

Options are far less forgiving if you're wrong on timing.

I mean, if there's fundamental problems, it eventually has to reflect in the stock price... right?

Please?

From a business perspective, poor IT security doesn't have to be a fundamental problem. Occasionally beating up your customers may be fine, and being voted as worst company in America isn't nessesarily that bad either.

Are there fines high enough to impact business? Are you on the receiving end of new legislation because of the event? Is the market both capable and willing to punish you? Depressingly often the answer to all of those is "no".

unless everyone's doing the same thing and it's already priced in the moment the news goes public.

That's why, regardless of how large a company scandal is, you can make a pretty good bet on the company surviving and recovering easily from the scandal, because the government will protect it/issue a tiny fine to save some face. In this case, Congress literally passed a law to save Equifax from private lawsuits. Absolute insanity. If this isn't a sign of a corrupt government, I don't know what is.

It's a very sad state of affairs that will likely get much worse before it starts getting better.

As far as "Congress literally passed a law to save Equifax from private lawsuits", what they did was part of the larger sweep of allowing companies to force arbitration on consumers. It was unrelated to the breach.

Considering equifax is one of 3 monopolistic credit reporting agencies, you can be sure they won't go out of business. So you buy the dips.

Same thing with tesla. Same thing any established legit stock of a legit company. In a major bull market you buy the dips as long as the music is playing. But once the music stops, you don't want to be dancing.

Same thing with major bear markets. Short the bumps.