Is Cybersecurity an Unsolvable Problem?
Ars Technica profiles Scott Shapiro, the co-author of a new book, Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age in Five Extraordinary Hacks. Shapiro points out that computer science "is only a century old, and hacking, or cybersecurity, is maybe a few decades old. It's a very young field, and part of the problem is that people haven't thought it through from first principles." Telling in-depth the story of five major breaches, Shapiro ultimately concludes that "the very principles that make hacking possible are the ones that make general computing possible. "So you can't get rid of one without the other because you cannot patch metacode." Shapiro also brings some penetrating insight into why the Internet remains so insecure decades after its invention, as well as how and why hackers do what they do. And his conclusion about what can be done about it might prove a bit controversial: there is no permanent solution to the cybersecurity problem. "Cybersecurity is not a primarily technological problem that requires a primarily engineering solution," Shapiro writes. "It is a human problem that requires an understanding of human behavior." That's his mantra throughout the book: "Hacking is about humans." And it portends, for Shapiro, "the death of 'solutionism.'" An excerpt from their interview: Ars Technica: The scientific community in various disciplines has struggled with this in the past. There's an attitude of, "We're just doing the research. It's just a tool. It's morally neutral." Hacking might be a prime example of a subject that you cannot teach outside the broader context of morality. Scott Shapiro: I couldn't agree more. I'm a philosopher, so my day job is teaching that. But it's a problem throughout all of STEM: this idea that tools are morally neutral and you're just making them and it's up to the end user to use it in the right way. That is a reasonable attitude to have if you live in a culture that is doing the work of explaining why these tools ought to be used in one way rather than another. But when we have a culture that doesn't do that, then it becomes a very morally problematic activity.
from Slashdot https://ift.tt/yqtrE3N
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
from Slashdot https://ift.tt/yqtrE3N
0 Response to "Is Cybersecurity an Unsolvable Problem?"
Post a Comment