Alex Stamos : AppSec is Eating Security

I’m throwing this into the pile of arguments for “security and privacy are little but myths” discussions.  If top of the top companies, with multi-million budgets and hundreds or thousands of top security professionals get compromised, how realistic is it for the average Joe to protect his business?  I say – not very.

I think 80% of problems can be prevented with the 20% time and effort investment: minimize attack surface by removing and disabling everything you don’t need or use and limiting access to everything else, use layered defense where possible, use encryption where possible and strong passwords if you have to, don’t rely on security through obscurity, have log analyzers and/or intrusion detection system installed, etc.  But most importantly, make peace with the fact that being compromised is not the question of “if”, but “when”.  Prepare yourself.  Have an offsite backup and know how to restore your services in a completely new environment, if necessary.

And as far as your privacy goes, if you put anything private on the Internet, as well, prepare for it to be stolen and leaked.  If it never happens, consider yourself lucky.  Otherwise, just learn to deal with it.  It’s very unpleasant in a variety of ways, but seldom deadly.

Via EtherealMind.