this must mean the consequences of such a breach has either not produced any visible damage, or the entity being damaged is uncaring (or have no power to care).
Instead we're constantly asked to sign one-sided contracts ("EULAs") which forbid us from suing. If a company's incompetence results in my data being leaked on the internet, there's no consequences. And not a thing any of us can do about it.
The disadvantage of this is that the local data protection agencies haven't been handing out very big fines. Sometimes that's due to company law. In my country you'd fine the owning company, which in many cases will be a holding company. Since fine sizes are linked to revenue and a holding company typically has no revenue, this means fines are often ridicilously small.
Yeah lets say you were carrying unencrypted frames for Bills Burger Hut.
The largest extent of the damage might be sniffing some smtp credentials or something. Bill sends some spam messages, never figures out how it was done but their IP reputation is always in the toilet.
Lets then say instead of Bills Burger Hut, you are carrying traffic for critical mineral and food industries. The attacker isnt a scammer, but a hostile nation state. Customer never realises, but theres a large, long term financial cost because (TOTALLY NOT CHINA) is sharing this data with competitors of yours overseas, or preparing to drop your pants in a huge way for foreign policy reasons.
No one gets fired until after the worst case long term damage, and even then probably not.
In fact, the likely outcome is that the burden gets moved to the customer for L2 encryption and the cowboy never changes.
Imagine jailing doctors for every patient that died you would be out of doctors quite soon.
Eg. doctors do get sued and fired for malpractice, if they did something no other skilled doctor would reasonably do ("let's just use the instruments from the previous surgery").
- Oops! mistakenly left some instrument inside and sewed up the patient - Junior begging to do certain step of the surgery while the anesthesiologist asking them to just get a move on. - Administered a drug to a newborn baby which was supposed to be given to the mother. (My sister's colleague did this with no consequences)
There is a world of difference between "nothing happened" and being fired. Just like in the NBA, a fine (monetary penalty) of a sufficient size will get someone's attention without losing their skills forever.
At least here in the EU we're moving toward personal responsibility for C level's who don't take IT and OT security serious in critical sectors, but in my anecdotal experience that is the first time anything regarding security has actually made decision makers take it serious. A lot of it is still just bureaucracy though. We have a DORA and NIS2 compliant piece of OT that is technically completely insecure but is compliant because we've written a detailed plan on how to make it secure.
I wont pretend that accountability in the physical engineering world is all smiles and rainbows but at least there are actual laws dictating responsibilities, certification and other real consequences for civil engineers. When a Professional Engineer in Canada signs-off (seal) on work they are legally assuming responsibility which means the practitioner could be held accountable in the event of professional misconduct or incompetence regarding the engineering work. There is no reason but corporate greed and corruption why there isn't similar legislation in North America for cybersecurity or software engineering where you have professional bodies certify people to be legally obligated to sign-off on work (and refuse work that isn't up to standards).
But this would require introducing actual legislation which god-forbid how could we do such a thing to the poor market! It would stifle their innovation at leaking everyone's data.
There's no reason we couldn't extend the same existing system of licensure [1] that professional engineers require.
Sure maybe its overkill for someone stringing together a python app, but if you're engineering the handling of any actual personal information then this work ought to be overseen by qualified, licensed and accountable professionals who are backed by actual laws.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Regulation_and_li...
The reason security is so bad everywhere is that nobody gets fired when there's a breach. It's just blamed on the hackers and everyone just goes on with life singing "We take security very seriously--this happened because of someone else!"