Howard Schmidt has been appointed as the US’s cyber czar. The position has been open for months, which is … interesting … considering how vital IT is to the world’s economy and safety.
Mr Schmidt, if you read this blog entry, please consider the following:
- Web Application Security is the most pressing need for change. It’s the key to nearly all attacks today, and the least well funded. Help OWASP and others to improve developer education, get the message out to CIOs to apportion their training budgets and remediation efforts accordingly.
- Be positive not negative. The attackers really don’t care if you “keep your computer up to date”. Let’s work mostly on things that can stop the issue in the first place. The horses have already bolted. Let’s make a better stable and fences so they can’t get out again.
- Push for real security, not security theatre. Listen to Bruce Schneier, and not the profits of doom that want to sell you useless widgets for billions that do nothing but annoy folks.
- If you can do any change, the first change has to be removal of indemnity for negligence with software development from licenses and sales. If an ISV doesn’t have a security development lifecycle, doesn’t include secure business requirements, and doesn’t require its developers to be trained in security coding practices, it IS negligent, and must be open to lawsuits. What we have today is not working and must be changed.
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