EXCELLENT Paper on IT Security - from 1972!

[deanwebb]

https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/AD0758206.pdf

Save it locally and refer to it every now and then. I first read this about 10-11 years ago. It is incredible how the author describes the world of IT that we have today. While technologies for connecting, storing, and processing information have improved over time, security has not. It has *always* been "somebody else's problem." Software guys aren't the only ones - there's some pretty bad security on every piece of hardware we use. Not "almost every". EVERY piece of hardware.

While I don't want to disconnect the PCs, power them off, melt them down, and then bury them under a mountain and then push the mountain to the base of the Marianas Trench, I *do* think that having everything interconnected is, on the whole, a bad idea. When I think about the technology I'd miss if I was living back in 1979, smart anything and Bluetooth are not on my list. All I need my fridge to do is to refrigerate things and have a frost-free freezer. My dishwasher should wash dishes. My lightbulbs should make light. I'm good with all that plain Jane stuff. By interconnecting all that stuff needlessly, we've increased our vulnerability to being trapped by our own technology when it fails us at scale.

The CrowdStrike-Windows mess is just the largest mess *thus far*. Bigger ones await us because no matter what happens here, security will always be someone else's problem.

[deanwebb]

And, as a coda, I just had to put in a ban on the MSFT OpenAI IP range because of odd inputs we were getting from it. Zero trust in action!