Dailydave mailing list archives
Re: Twitter: (verb) to fail under exponential growth
From: "Paul Melson" <pmelson () gmail com>
Date: Wed, 2 Jul 2008 10:18:46 -0400
My thought is this, to avoid getting into the specifics than annoy everyone: People tend to think they can "manage" their networks or their application security, but their management skills are scaling linearly and the problem is scaling exponentially and they can only throw money at it for so long. When people talk about a "self-healing network" what they mean is "we can't afford to manage exponentially growing problems - those problems have to manage themselves".
You can (and, for the foreseeable future, will) continue to "throw money" at it for as long as your organization needs IT to function. There is no financial failure point for security today. There's no point at which the CFO and the auditors come down and unplug the [web application] firewall and say, "Why bother? No security is cheaper than some security." When people buy concepts (and the underlying products) like "self-healing" networks, what they really mean is, "we're technologists, and we believe in automation over staffing." It's natural enough, but as you point out, it doesn't tend to work well, and never has.
Of course, Immunity does offense, not defense, and I'm having to translate here from my native language. Where you want a self-healing network, we are creating a self-attacking network, and so on. Having looked at the problem of exponential growth from the attacker's side,
The same goes for this. Automated attacks are efficient, but against the same target, their value quickly declines over time. I can only assume that the same will be shown true for automated code analysis. I envision a future where "Direct Use of Threads" is the new "ICMP timestamp replies from router" finding. :-) PaulM _______________________________________________ Dailydave mailing list Dailydave () lists immunitysec com http://lists.immunitysec.com/mailman/listinfo/dailydave
Current thread:
- Re: Twitter: (verb) to fail under exponential growth Dave Aitel (Jul 01)
- Re: Twitter: (verb) to fail under exponential growth Trygve Aasheim (Jul 02)
- Re: Twitter: (verb) to fail under exponential growth Paul Melson (Jul 02)