I am doing an increased amount of monitoring of security, vulnerability, and cybersecurity reports lately. While doing this type of work, it can become easy to slip into despair, as you realize how vulnerable we are to attack, in conjunction with how badly behaved everyone is being on all sides.
As I see it, we have to work very hard to be sensible and proactive about security, and work to educate individuals, business and government leaders to be savvy when it comes to online security, and privacy--as a community we have a lot of educational and awareness work ahead of us.
Even with all of this work, I do not think we are ever going to be able to achieve 100% security over our bits and bytes. We are going to have to find a way to shift the culture of online behavior to make hacking, and the use of many of the cyber weapons we are seeing emerge, unacceptable to use.
I am not sure what the specific actions are that might help us down this higher road--more thoughts to come on this. One thing I do know is that all of this is not sustainable, and what worries me the most is that the US seems to have set the bar for bad behavior pretty high with the activities of NSA, our law enforcement, and of the larger tech community.
