Listening to security boffins chatter about the industry in the post-Heartbleed weeks, the advice is much the same. Silo data, restrict access to the best stuff, and buy whatever tool the security boffin is flogging at the time.
Proactive advice tends to be popular in the wake of a crisis. It lets people take action rather than ruminate on when the next attack is due to come, and it allows journalists to create easily digestible and memorable lists. Everybody is happy.
Yet security experts say something else, which tends not to be trumpeted so loudly. End-users are idiots. They don’t actually say that, obviously – nobody got rich by insulting their customers. But the negligence among those at the bloody end of computing is a major cause of data breaches, and everyone in the industry knows it.
An IBM survey last month revealed that half of servers audited by the firm’s subsidiary PowerTech had more than 30 users still using default passwords. The eBay hack not long after similarly raised concerns that people were using passwords across websites, meaning that a breach of one site could lead to breaches on many. This is easy stuff, but people are still getting it wrong.
Speaking to CBR this week, Dave Taylor of security firm WatchGuard argued that usability should now be a prime concern for the industry. He noted that security products can be weighed down with features that many users never touch. "We have to make it so easy to use that they will use it," he said, carelessly failing to mention how easy his firm’s Firebox T10 was to install.
In other words, the customer doesn’t care enough to play the game how vendor want it to be played, it wants security firms to bridge the gap. Unreasonable? Probably. But when they cannot even be bothered to change their password from, er, password, tech officers have to react somehow.
