For decades we’ve heard that iCalamity is right around the corner. For decades we’ve largely ignored pleas to try and address computer security issues when they are relatively cheap and easy, before they got too large and complicated to do at all. We have been living a fairy tale life, and absent bold action and an emphasis on resiliency, it only gets grim(m)er going forward.

Reasonably affordable personal computers became a thing when I was in high school. I fiddled around a bit, but I didn’t know that computer security was a thing until I was on active duty and the Morris Worm was all over the news. Between the last time the band Snap! charted and today, we have covered a lot of ground from a general purpose IT perspective. We’ve gone from HTML and CGI to the cloud. From a security perspective however, we’ll still largely relying on firewalls, anti-virus, and SSL.

Why the disparate pace of progress? People demand that their technology be functional, not secure. Like so many areas of our lives, we worry about the here and now, not the what-might-be. We only worry about risks until a sufficiently horrific scenario occurs, or if one is not enough, until enough of them occur in a sufficiently short period of time.

Of course today we don’t just have to worry about securing PCs. By now it is fairly common knowledge that your car is full of computers, as is increasingly your house. Some people wear computers, and some of us are walking around with computers inside of us. Critical infrastructure is lousy with computers, and  we recently learned that those shepherd boys crying ‘wolf’ all those years weren’t playing us for fools, they were just too early.

The fragility of our standard of living is no longer the musings of Cassandras. The proof of concept was thankfully demonstrated far, far away, but the reality is we’re not any safer just because ‘merica. Keeping the lights on, hearts beating, and the water flowing is a far more complex endeavor than you find in the commodity IT world. It is entirely possible that in some situations there is no fix to certain problems, which means given various inter-dependencies we will always find ourselves with a Damoclean sword over our heads.

Mixed mythologies notwithstanding, the key to success writ large is insight and resiliency. The more aware you are of what you have, how it works, and how to get along without it will be critical to surviving both accidents and attacks. I would like to think that the market will demand both functional and secure technology, and that manufacturers will respond accordingly, but 50 years of playing kick the can tells me that’s not likely. The analog to security in industrial environments is safety, and that’s one area power plants, hospitals, and the like have down far better than their peers in the general purpose computing world. We might not be able to secure the future, but with luck we should be able to survive it.

For context on the latest cybersecurity topics see our Cyber Threat Analysis Series. 

About the Author

Michael Tanji

Michael Tanji spent nearly 20 years in the US intelligence community. Trained in both SIGINT and HUMINT disciplines he has worked at the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and the National Reconnaissance Office. At various points in his career he served as an expert in information warfare, computer network operations, computer forensics, and indications and warning. A veteran of the US Army, Michael has served in both strategic and tactical assignments in the Pacific Theater, the Balkans, and the Middle East.