Understanding and communication of problems will continue to be a challenge for security practitioners.
Kicking off the opening day of Black Hat Europe in London, founder Jeff Moss said that the event was “trying to be different and be more practical” and encouraged the audience to try at home or at work if they “see something on the screen.”
He followed this with a request for a show of hands on whether there is more complexity, or less, to which the majority said more while around a third said that they talk to the board more.
“What I am seeing as a trend is an increasing security fragility, and I don’t like this, but I don’t see a way around it.
“What we do is identify a problem, we engineer a solution and the solution potentially makes the problem more fragile but as engineers we’ve decided that it’s worth the trade-off and we’ve decided ‘risk for security’ and we do this without talking to anyone in government, business or civil society.”
Moss said that this is done without consideration of the impact upon everyone on the planet, but they are not the ones in the room and making the security trade-off. “We will be more and more involved in making these global decisions that will impact and maybe frustrate people in governments around the world.”
Moss concluded by saying that this will leave to awareness in governments and in businesses, and he said that will happen more as “we are called on more to explain these matters” and some of us will need to develop the skills to translate this for businesses “as if we screw it up we won’t be listened to.”
He argued that if this fails it will be due to a communication issue, rather than a technology issue.