Seeing your other (rightfully flagged) reply I want to tell you as a neutral party that yes this is missing the point of the analogy. You're basically saying "I would simply hit the brakes on the trolley". It's not that they're so hubristic they think it's impossible to legitimately disagree with their argument, it's that mentioning insurance is sidestepping their argument entirely. You're not addressing the general idea of getting hacked and suffering the consequences of the hack.

You're missing the point (not sure if you're just being dense on purpose...). If you're bank would just return the money then its not a good analogy. If someone gains root access to your machine, presumably they can do damage that can't be undone. In other words, to continue the bank analogy, they would take all your money and you would have no way of getting it back. Presumably, you would not be ok with this. And even if, for some weird reason, you were ok with that, 99.9% of all other people would not be ok with it.

Respectfully, I don't think they're missing the point. Banking, as an institution, has its flaws, but deposit insurance isn't one of them. These vulnerabilities exist whether or not they follow specific disclosure rituals, and systems should be deployed with defense-in-depth so that one privilege-escalation flaw is a recoverable event. Inventing tortured counterfactual analogies doesn't change the basic thrust of the poster's point: the account is insured, so getting drained by an attacker is not a fatal problem. Of course people should still take steps to prevent that from happening, but that doesn't mean prevention is (or should be) the only cure.

My point specifically is that some damage isn't recoverable if there's a vulnerability that gives someone root access. This makes the bank analogy inadequate in the first place. Im not trying to argue about whether deposit insurance is good or bad. Saying they would get the money back assumes the damage done to ones machine would be recoverable, which may not be the case.

I apologize if I'm missing something obvious here, not trying to be difficult.

My understanding is that FDIC deposit insurance only protects against bank failure, not fraudulent activity. Getting your account drained by an attacker may or may not be covered by a patchwork of other laws at various levels, and you could very well end up shit out of luck.

The banks cost of insurance goes up, cost of running an account goes up, how do we correct for this? offer worse accounts to customers...

Why do you assume banks would keep on doing the same old thing but paying more because of it? The cost would make them learn not to design systems where something like this hypothetical scenario was possible.

"I, personally am not affected, and I don't care about anyone else so therefore there are no consequences"

Just socialize losses and all is well.

What could possibly go wrong?

that is basically how all large companies behave anyway. socialize the losses (bailouts, layoffs, negative economic impacts in the communities they reside, etc.) and privatize the gains.

> that is basically how all large companies behave anyway

And do you agree with that behaviour?

nope

And what is the insurance in the Linux case, for which the analogy was being made?

Linux was informed properly, and the vuln was not disclosed until 30 days after the kernel was patched.

The real debate here is what went wrong with getting that info downstream, and whose responsibility was that?