Once you understand how difficult attack mitigation is, then you can pick and choose from a variety of factors:
- executives may not have a realistic understanding of how difficult attack mitigation is so they don’t allocate the resources for hiring
- incompetent admins overestimating their abilities
- competent admins who are underfunded
- incompetent admins who underestimate the value of the data they’re protecting
- competetent admins who may not have an accurate picture of what data they’re trying to protect so their threat model is flawed due to inaccurate information
- executives who are aware of how difficult mitigation is but don’t place customer data privacy as a priority.
- the current iteration of our growth obsessed corporate models unintentionally results in a race to the bottom in many ways.
- little incentive for companies to factor in social impacts as we don’t yet seem inclined to figure out a way to include impacts on society as one of the many metrics to measure a company’s success or failures.
It’s worth remembering though, even the most responsible, most well funded, most security conscious, and best staffed organizations have been compromised at one point or another—security is hard.
