"And as critical as Twitter is, we have the exact same dynamic with our privatized water and power companies - who have no plans to make strategic investments in security or anything really - which is why on public calls you can hear them humiliating themselves asking Jen Easterly to absorb the entire costs of their security programs. "
Long time lurker, first time poster. This hits me where I live because I run a Red Team for a large privatized power company, which is one of many strategic investments in security my company makes despite the fact that our budget is scrutinized and approved to the line item by the state's Public Service Commission and we must justify the value of, in some cases, individual tools. I've only been doing this a few months and it's been quite an education in how far the definition of capitalism can be made to stretch. It's hard to call something a failure of the market when there never was a market and it definitely wasn't free, notwithstanding the fact that it has shareholders and dividends.
Whether we do it ourselves, which we do, or ask the government to pay is somewhat academic, since taxpayers and ratepayers are the same people, and since our money is subject to state control just like the state's money. It's even more academic in the age of COVID, when people aren't paying their power bills and the state and federal governments are helping keep the lights on.
The standard model in our industry is to make a profit on capital expenditures but not operations and maintenance, e.g., all of security. The PSC/PUC rightly scrutinizes O&M expenditures because that's where you put the executive yachts and such if you are so inclined. Security does OK in the state where my employer is located because the PSC can read the news, but the point is: the Board of Directors isn't scheming to offload costs to the taxpayer. The Board of Directors spends what it's allowed to by the taxpayers' representatives.
We may not really be the target of that remark, though, because for all of that we're actually the haves. The have-nots in power utilities are the rural co-ops with ten employees, two servers, a bunch of distribution transformers, and zero profits, where IT is done by a local contractor and security is not done. Those are the folks who are really offloading security to the taxpayer, and they have no choice whatsoever.
On Wed, Aug 24, 2022 at 8:51 AM Dave Aitel via Dailydave dailydave@lists.aitelfoundation.org wrote:
If you were at a talk at Defcon this year in the Policy track, you probably heard someone talk about how they, as a government official, are there to address "market failures". And immediately you thought: This is a load of nonsense.
Because that government official is not allowed to, and has no intentions of, addressing any market failures whatsoever. If the Government was going to address market failures, they'd have to find some way to convince every cloud provider from making their security features the upsell on the Platinum package. They'd have to talk about how trying to get into different markets means every social media company faces huge pressures to put Indian spies on their network.
Obviously you know, as someone who did not emerge from under a rock into the security community yesterday, that the answer to having a malicious insider on your network is probably some smart segmentation, which we call "Zero Trust" now.
But Zero Trust is expensive! And most social media companies are not exactly profitable as the great monster known as TikTok has eaten every eyeball in every market because the very concept of having people explicitly choose who their friends are is outdated now.
In fact, as everyone is pointing out, almost all companies you know are in this position! They're cutting costs by sending jobs overseas while spending huge amounts of money propping up their stock prices and paying their executives to sell them to a dwindling market of buyers. Private Equity companies spend every effort on squeezing the last dollar out of old enterprise software by exploiting the lock-in they have on small businesses.
And as critical as Twitter is, we have the exact same dynamic with our privatized water and power companies - who have no plans to make strategic investments in security or anything really - which is why on public calls you can hear them humiliating themselves asking Jen Easterly to absorb the entire costs of their security programs.
The ideal practice for all of these companies is to offload their costs onto the taxpayer, which is why instead of investing in security, they cry for the FBI to go collect their bitcoin from whatever ransomware crews are on their network this week using offensive cyber operations that themselves cost the government an order of magnitude more than the bitcoin is worth.
As you're sitting in that Defcon talk, listening to someone from government talk about how they only want to regulate with the "input of industry" or something, you have to wonder: if this is every company we know, maybe the market failure isn't just how hard it is to buy a good security product because they all abuse the copyright system to avoid any kind of performance transparency. Maybe it's also how hard it is to SELL a good security product because every single company is trying to cut their budget to the exact minimum amount that will allow them to tell the FBI they did their best, and the FBI needs to go out there and pick up their slack.
-dave
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