In every field of engineering, there is a grace period when the engineers doing the heroic work of making a complex and highly valuable new technology work can escape liability for poor performance, failures, or damages caused by what they build. That grace erodes as the technology becomes commonplace. Eventually, usually through a combination of litigation, legislation, regulation, and evolving insurance requirements, liability and responsibility for failure starts being pinned to the engineers who designed and built the failed system.
Our current concept of cybersecurity is to defend against attacks and remedy failure by erecting more and better defenses. That’s a fundamental mistake in thinking that guarantees failure. Why? Because it’s mathematically impossible for a defensive strategy to fully succeed, as explained in the previous installment of this article series. Another even more fundamental mistake in thinking is that cyberattackers are the cause of our woes. They aren’t. They’re the effect.
This article is the second in a series on the physicality of data. Cybersecurity failures have been trending sharply upwards in number and severity for the past 25 years. The target of every cyberattack is data — i.e., digitized information that is created, processed, stored and distributed by computers. Cyberattackers seek to steal, corrupt, impede or destroy data. Users, software, hardware and networks aren’t the target; they’re vectors (pathways) to the target. To protect data, the current strategy, “defense in depth,” seeks to shut off every possible vector to data by erecting layered defenses. Bad news: That’s mathematically impossible.