They say your systems are vulnerable as hell, and they told the CEO about it, but he did nothing. He didn't allow the NSA to come in and fix anything; he also didn't take any action on his own to have people internal to the corporation fix it.

What's your obvious response? Fire the CEO and install a new one who will direct the appropriate resources to fixing the problem.

None. That's part of my point: the root problem is not actually security by itself, it's bad corporate governance. CEOs should be fired for such things, but they're not.

> If the "free market" doesn't care

Corporate governance is not a free market nowadays. It was more of one in the past (although an argument can be made that there were important non-free market forces even then), when most stock ownership was in the hands of individuals who at least had some incentive to hold boards of directors accountable for long-term stewardship, since they were investing with a long time horizon for their own retirement.

But now most stock ownership is in the hands of large mutual funds (since that's where most people's retirement funds are now), which don't care about long-term stewardship; they only care about short-term earnings. So corporations have a positive incentive to overlook things that, to be fixed, will require sacrificing short-term earnings for long-term stewardship. Individual investors never even see this; all they see is the overall rate of return of their mutual funds. So they don't realize the long-term consequences of what is going on and aren't able to apply free market incentives to correct things.

That's probably a rounding error on their quarterly report. Heck, it might have cost them more money to hire more people to provide adequate security to prevent such attacks than to just suck it up and get attacked.

It may actually be economically favorable to stay insecure!

If that were the case, the market would actually encourage CEO's to spend less money on security, not more.

Realistically, I find it not credible to believe that nobody in big infrastructure companies with IT departments is aware that they have vulnerable systems. I find it far more likely that people are aware and people in positions of leadership making decisions about risk have decided that these risks are acceptable.

Do you think getting an email from the NSA telling IT what they already know is going to change those calculations? My experience with bug bounty programs is that leaders who make risk decisions are more likely to shrug and say "I know, we're OK with that risk".

I realize that this is a personal judgment, and other people may have had wildly different experiences.

No, that's not what the email from NSA would say. It would not say "there is a risk of your systems being compromised by cyberattack" in general terms, which is what IT already knows. It would say "your systems are vulnerable to these specific attacks", which IT does not know. So yes, getting this new information should change the risk-benefit calculation dramatically.

For example, a hospital IT department might get an email telling them that their MRI is exposing remote desktop to the internet with default credentials. They know that. They don't change it because if they do, their vendor will drop support. This is a real thing that real medical hardware has to deal with, and it's only slowly getting better.

A big industrial company might easily have it worse than a hospital. Fixing the specific CVE on a specific port on a specific machine might mean having to retire a whole series of obscure, niche bits of SCADA hardware that don't support anything modern. It's like all those IoT gadgets that don't support 5GHz, writ large.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCADA#Security_issues

Somewhere between those two, you have your well-run Windows network. It's probably a month to several months of patching behind. IT has a whole process to test any new patches for stability and compatibility with line-of-business software to ensure that nothing breaks. Knowing that their systems are vulnerable to the CVE that's fixed by a patch they're testing - or tested and found broke something important - might not always help them very much.

The alternatives are a regulatory system for information security or offering advice and hoping companies implement it. There's a lot of advice on offer.

They have a report with a list of vulnerabilities. If you don't fix them to your satisfaction, you will be fined in 2 months, 2 months after that you get fined and publicly reported as negligent, and 2 months after that you get fined again and your outstanding vulnerabilities will be published for everyone to take advantage of.

How much effort are you going to put in to securing your infrastructure?

The NSA seems to agree with you. So do the Departments of Energy, Commerce, and Defense, all of which have various efforts to provide independently verifiable high quality security advice, best practices, and guidance. In some cases, they've been doing so for years.

But let's skip the NSA bit. Let's say you, CEO of Big Pipeline Co, have been called up by someone at The Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response within the Department of Energy. They offer you all the advice and guidance you could wish for. Now it's up to you to budget resources. What do you do?

Realistically, you probably hand that advice off to your IT or software staff and hope for the best. Though I realize that reasonable people may differ on this point.

There's already branches of cabinet-level departments that try to do this. In my opinion they're having about the same level of efficacy as one might expect in any other set of large-scale changes in very large old companies with a wide variety of internal systems and needs. If you look you'll find a plethora of government-led attempts to secure various critical industries.

You'll also note that entertainment companies and hospitals are routinely breached. There's perhaps room to question if they are indeed practicing good cybersecurity.

That is certainly not how it works. See the links others posted for context. NSA is more likely to inform you of the vulnerabilities and associated mitigations.