I don't think that criminal negligence is the most helpful legal tool for incentivizing improved security. It's too hard to prove negligence.

Instead, there should be standard civil penalties for leaking various degrees of PII paid as restitution to the affected individual. Importantly, this must be applied REGARDLESS of "certification" or whether any security practices were "incorrect" or "insufficient". Even if there's a zero-day exploit and you did everything right, you pay. That's the cost of storing people's secrets.

This would make operating services whose whole "thing" is storing a bunch of information about individuals (like Canvas) much more expensive. Good! It's far to cheap to stockpile a ticking time bomb of private info and then walk away paying no damages just because you complied with some out-of-date list of rules or got the stamp of approval from a certification org that's incentivized to give out stamps of approval.

Let's do this.

The only right answer.

And this strict liability will come with an expectation of insurance. The insurance policies will necessitate audits, which will actually improve security.

I feel like there’s a tendency here to seriously overestimate how damaging these leaks are to individuals.

For most individuals impacted by these hacks, appropriate restitution would be $0. Anything more than that would go beyond making them whole.

It's not a popular opinion but I agree. I live in a country that has a very extensive principle of public records, and often times these leaks disclose much less than you would get by simply calling the authorities and ask. Now, whether that's good or bad is a different story.

We use to hand out whole books of this information to as many people as possible. (phone books)

Leaking school or medical record can have serious personal consequences that cannot even be enumerated

It can, but not for most people. For most people leaking that stuff would still have damages of zero dollars.

Which is what the comment above was referring to. "Most people". Not "all people".

How could you possibly make it illegal to host insecure services? Is any service 100% secure? And if it were how would we know?

I do agree with the audit and punishments for clear failure to adhere to established standards.

This is a solved problem in pretty much every other domain of life - if you are following best practises but something that wasn't reasonably forseeable happens, then you're fine, but if the bad thing happens as a result of negligence then you are in trouble.

Criminal law isn't about making things alright for the victim. That's what insurance is for.

Even if you leave your door unlocked, if someone walks in and steals your stuff, it's a crime. The state has an interest in prosecuting crimes even if the victim didn't do everything they could to prevent it.

> Criminal law isn't about making things alright for the victim

Restitution and retribution are the components of justice [1] entirely about "making things alright for the victim."

[1] https://www.unodc.org/e4j/en/crime-prevention-criminal-justi...

The company is not the victim here. Its users are. [I suppose my previous comment was a bit ambigious - i meant something bad happens to someone else not to yourself]

A better version of your analogy would be if your landlord failed to repair your front door in a reasonable period of time and as a result soneone walked in and stole your stuff. Yes the theif is the primary responsible party, but the landlords negligence in maintaining the property probably also exposes them to some liability.

P.s. This is neither here nor there, but restitution is a part of criminal law.

Some liability, sure. Civil, not criminal, though, right?

But the post I was responding to said it should be a crime to have unsecured systems.

That is equivalent to saying it should be a crime to leave your door unlocked.

"Best practice" in cybersecurity is largely vendor-driven with little to no independent empirical validation.

That standard is likely to lock people into buying some pretty bad software, but it does little to ensure that they're running reasonably secure systems.

I like to relate it to operating an automobile. You can follow every traffic law and still be liable in an accident, because you owned the vehicle that caused the damage. This is why you have insurance.

In civil law maybe, but you aren’t allowed to blame a rape victim for choosing to walk down rape alley…

No building has a 100% chance of not caving in, yet somehow I think charges would be laid if a skyscraper caved in.

The equivalent analogy is charging lock/door/drywall/timber makers and suppliers for lapses if a thief entered the house by picking a lock or drilling/sawing through the wall.

No, it’s more like me storing my money at a bank, and then someone stealing from the bank, who told me they were secure. And turns out they had shitty locks.

This analogy seems to be portraying 'ransomware hackers' as an unstoppable force of nature akin to gravity.

I'm not sure that's a fair analogy.

The other side of that spectrum portrays the service providers as pure, negligence-free victims. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle.

Your analogy portrays gravity as a thing that buildings cannot be built to withstand. There are plenty of structurally sound buildings and while there are plenty of secure apps the problem is there’s no incentive to build the latter.

On the contrary.

My analogy would be: of course buildings have to be built to withstand gravity. That’s a natural part of the world that cannot be eliminated.

Buildings are built to stand up to natural forces. But not to, for example, the threat of a malicious actor crashing a plane into them. That isn’t typically considered a reasonable thing to architect civilian infrastructure for.

When you built IT infrastructure likewise you should build it to handle the natural forces it will be exposed to. But are you as accountable for securing it against the acts of malicious parties as a structural engineer is for securing a building against gravity, or as accountable for securing against those acts as the structural engineer is for securing that building against terrorists?

I think it’s a very fair analogy. The _only_ way to stop them is to make your stuff secure. That’s literally the only way.

We do not generally hold victims of crimes accountable for failing to defend themselves adequately.

If someone threatens you with a knife and gets you to hand over your wallet, your bank doesn’t get to say ‘you should have hired better security’ when the mugger uses your credit card.

The problem here is the mugger, and that’s who the state goes after. Even if the victim walked into a bad area. Even if the victim could have defended themselves.

Same with ransomware attackers. They are the problem. We might encourage potential victims to behave in ways that make it less likely for them to be targeted. But if they are targeted, we should still focus our societal disdain on the criminal not the victim.

While I’m sympathetic to this argument (it would be great if the internet were a safe place), in practice this thinking leads to governments trying to impose legislation that hurts legitimate uses but does little to protect from the long tail of harm. There’s little that can be done about North Korean state sanctioned cybercrime without a great firewall.

If the perpetrators of this hack were caught and in a developed country, they would certainly be prosecuted for their crimes and not get off light (especially if any data is actually leaked).

I think states should be able to do better than a ‘great firewall’ to defend their domestic net infrastructure from malicious foreign actors.

But I do think it should be much more states’ responsibility to make their domestic network safe for citizens and businesses and institutions to operate.

"established standards" - now who has the incentive to run shitty services? those big enough to control the "established standards".

If Boeing claimed a plane was airworthy, but it crashed because basic engineering controls were skipped, we have collectively put our faith in the NTSB to preserve evidence, run an independent technical investigation, etc. There is no such authority for software - most security auditors (SOC2, HITRUST, etc) are just looking at self-reported data.

Just take a look at the recent Epic vs. Health Gorilla lawsuit to see how nonexistent the protection is around exchanging your medical records, one of the most sensitive types of PII.

Edit: I was incorrect / non-American, I was thinking of your FAA.

Has a corporate officer ever gone to jail or been meaningfully fined for a data breach?

Yes, many times.

> Incidents like this should be followed by an audit and charges being laid

What? Why? Who died? This whole thing is perfectly dealt with through civil process.

People who haven’t been hacked just haven’t been looked at. If someone wants to hack you, they will hack you. It’s really unfortunate that people have this level of confidence in their ability.

Here’s an example. https://hacks.mozilla.org/2026/05/behind-the-scenes-hardenin...

I think you're 100000% correct.

These problems will continue as long as it is legal to operate in an unsafe way.

We've learned this in every other industry, but we can't seem to accept it in software. One of my hopes for AI is that it reduces the cost to behave responsibly to a level where this absurd resistance to acting responsibly erodes.

I have a simpler view on this.

Every service that is online will be hacked eventually, it's only a matter of time.

Time is the most powerful force in the universe.