Thursday, March 8, 2007

Rushing to Catch up with the 70s (Part 3) - The Big Picture

This posting is in response to Andy the IT guy's blog posting which in turn is about a Dark Reading article.

In summary the article blames all the problems we have today on the way the Internet was designed.

In my first (serious) post on my blog I discuss how secure we were back in the 70s (well..not me..I was still a kid) because computers were designed to not trust their users. With the advent of DOS computers were all trusting and it has taken time to get back to how it was in the 70's. We are still on our way.

Add the two together and you get - strict, secure PCs and open networks. Sounds good to me.

Maybe one day PCs will be so tight that they can sit out on the Internet and we will not have to worry about them. Maybe we will be able to know who is connecting to our network and be happy in the knowledge that their PC can't possibly be in dire need of patches. Maybe viruses will become a thing of the past.

Social engineering will always be with us until we can build better people. Maybe our kids are already learning. We grew up in a world where you don't talk to strangers, they are growing up in one where you don't blog with them or instant message them. The wolf is still there, he is just online. And maybe this will make our kids more infosec aware.

I don't see us ever getting rid of Firewalls but it would be nice if the work of keeping PCs safe was done on the boxes and not on the network. Like it was in the 70s.

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