Cybersecurity

Why Are There So Damn Many Cybersecurity Breaches?

Let me try to explain part of what I think about it

Photo by Bermix Studio on Unsplash

It all sounds good from the pulpit,but come Monday morning all the sinners are back to business as usual writing crappy code. (Tony Lawrence)

I’m old enough to fondly remember the days when computer security meant keeping the server room door locked. Most of my Unix support and troubleshooting customers didn’t have internet and even remote access by modem was fairly rare. You actually needed physical access to at least the building to do anything bad.

Not that I never saw problems. I provided tech support and problem solving for Unix systems, those more powerful back-end servers that few people know about. Unix systems have the advantages of relative obscurity (more hackers know about Windows than Unix) and stronger control of ordinary users.

But, nothing is perfect; for example one customer used his server room for storing office supplies. The door was always open so that employees could grab what they needed. That wouldn’t have been so dangerous if the local administrator didn’t habitually leave the Unix console logged in as the “root” user. In those days…