From: Diplomatic Courier
Written by Sean S. Costigan, Guest Contributor
With each advancing year, more novel information technology is brought online, simultaneously advancing societal capabilities and dependence on new and legacy systems in areas as diverse as healthcare, finance, entertainment, defense, and critical infrastructure. Despite unceasing news of cyber attacks and various exploits that appear to strike into the nervous system of modern society, many information technology companies continue their long pattern of outsourcing risk, since—it is thought—building technology with security first in mind may make it harder to bring to market or less profitable.
Yet it is not only new information technology that is laden with obscure troubles. By now it should be apparent to anyone reading the news that legacy computer systems on which we all depend have fundamental weaknesses. Consider, for example, the “Heartbleed” and “Shellshock” vulnerabilities that just recently came to light, both of which exposed decades old problems that could still have very serious results on critical networks.
Today there is a constant dynamic at play of researchers finding holes and acting to plug them or criminals exploiting them first in so-called zero-day attacks. To put this in cybersecurity terms, the attack surface of our information-technology dominated society is vastly expanding and the gains in security are too few to cover us.
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