Security quotes of the week

It is possible to monitor and control float trucks, public bus or delivery vans from the internet, obtaining their speed, position, and a lot other parameters. You can even control some parameters of the vehicle or hack into the canbus of the vehicle remotely.

Saving it [data] is dangerous because it's hard for companies to secure. For a lot of reasons, computer and network security is very difficult. Attackers have an inherent advantage over defenders, and a sufficiently skilled, funded and motivated attacker will always get in.

And saving it is dangerous because failing to secure it is damaging. It will reduce a company's profits, reduce its market share, hurt its stock price, cause it public embarrassment, and­ -- in some cases -- ­result in expensive lawsuits and occasionally, criminal charges.

All this makes data a toxic asset, and it continues to be toxic as long as it sits in a company's computers and networks. The data is vulnerable, and the company is vulnerable. It's vulnerable to hackers and governments. It's vulnerable to employee error. And when there's a toxic data spill, millions of people can be affected.

The smog of personal data is the carbon dioxide of privacy. We’ve emitted far too much of it over the past decades, refusing to contemplate the consequences until the storms came. Now they’ve arrived, and they’ll only get worse, because the databases that haven’t breached yet are far bigger, and more sensitive than those that have.

Like climate change, the privacy catastrophes of the next two decades are already inevitable. The problem we face is preventing the much worse catastrophes of the following the decades.

And as computers are integrated into the buildings and vehicles and cities we inhabit, as they penetrate our bodies, the potential harms from breaches will become worse.

Because -- let's face it -- all this talk of SHA-1 certificates and TLS and battles between the green balls and orange triangles mean nothing to most people.

They just want to pay their damned bills. And while we can assume that AT&T will eventually update their certs, good luck finding the person at AT&T in charge of actually doing that. Sure, call up customer service and try get them to fix it. Go ahead. Everyone should have a hobby.