Monday, 4 March 2013

Law #10: Technology Is Not A Panacea


Technology can do some amazing things. Recent years have seen the development of ever cheaper and more powerful hardware, software that harnesses the hardware to open new vistas for computer users, as well as advancement in cryptography and other sciences. It’s tempting to believe that technology can deliver a risk free world, if we just work hard enough. However, this is simply not realistic.
            Perfect security requires a level of perfection that simply doesn’t exist, and in fact isn’t likely to ever exist. This is true for software as well as virtually all fields of human interest. Software development is an imperfect science, and all software has bugs. Some of them can be exploited to cause security breaches. That’s just a fact of life. But ever if software could be made perfect, it wouldn’t solve the problem entirely. Most attacks involve, to one degree or another, some manipulation of human nature this is usually referred to as social engineering. Raise the cost and difficulty of attacking security technology, and bad guys will respond by shifting their focus away from the technology and toward the human being at the console. It’s vital that you understand your role in maintaining solid security, or you could become the chink in your own systems’ armor.

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