News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:U.S. to give ransomware hacks similar priority as terrori... by pdonis on Thursday June 03, 2021 @06:36PM (#27388320)
Let's say you're the Chairman of the Board of Directors at Big Pipeline Co. One day your phone rings. It's the NSA.

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.

Re:U.S. to give ransomware hacks similar priority as terrori... by hindsightbias on Thursday June 03, 2021 @07:05PM (#27388574)
What CEOs have ever been fired for security breaches? If the "free market" doesn't care, why would any "I told you so" from the gov't make any difference. He'll have already taken his golden parachute and some poor CSO will take the fall.
Re:U.S. to give ransomware hacks similar priority as terrori... by pdonis on Thursday June 03, 2021 @07:50PM (#27388870)
> What CEOs have ever been fired for security breaches?

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.

Re:U.S. to give ransomware hacks similar priority as terrori... by stdgy on Friday June 04, 2021 @01:38AM (#27390948)
To play devil's advocate, how much money did this breach actually cost the pipeline? A few million bucks?

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.

Re:U.S. to give ransomware hacks similar priority as terrori... by Kalium on Thursday June 03, 2021 @07:12PM (#27388638)
There's a running joke in the security community that CSO stands for Chief Sacrificial Officer.