Would have loved to have seen this presentation.
In a presentation here yesterday, [Peter] Tippett -- who is vice president of risk intelligence for Verizon Business, chief scientist at ICSA Labs, and the inventor of the program that became Norton AntiVirus -- said that about one third of today's security practices are based on outmoded or outdated concepts that don't apply to today's computing environments.I always enjoy seeing conventional wisdom get challenged, and there are more than a few challenges in this article. Great stuff.
[...]
Tippett also suggested that many security pros waste time trying to buy or invent defenses that are 100 percent secure. "If a product can be cracked, it's sometimes thrown out and considered useless," he observed. "But automobile seatbelts only prevent fatalities about 50 percent of the time. Are they worthless? Security products don't have to be perfect to be helpful in your defense."
This concept also applies to security processes, Tippett said. "There's a notion out there that if I do certain processes flawlessly, such as vulnerability patching or updating my antivirus software, that my organization will be more secure. But studies have shown that there isn't necessarily a direct correlation between doing these processes well and the frequency or infrequency of security incidents.
"You can't always improve the security of something by doing it better," Tippett said. "If we made seatbelts out of titanium instead of nylon, they'd be a lot stronger. But there's no evidence to suggest that they'd really help improve passenger safety."
http://www.darkreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=145224
