Taking a step back to gain some perspective

[Trey Darley <trey@soltra.com>]

Hi, everybody -

Two seemingly opposing camps have emerged within our community. For
lack of better terminology (and with no offense intended to either
side) I'd call these the ontology and messaging tribes. There seems to
be a natural human tendency to focus on our differences. I sometimes
think if there were only two people left alive on an island after some
apocalyptic event, in short order they'd find cause for war between
them.

Let's take a step back and consider what problem we're actually trying
to solve here.

The entire internet is rickety. Say you're out on a hike and need to
cross a stream. You step gingerly from one stone to another, carefully
testing each next step before shifting your entire center of gravity
to the next stone. As a civilization, we've managed to place our
center of gravity on an unsteady rock called the internet and there's
no going back.

The attackers currently have the advantage. This is the situation we
confront.

The ultimate goal of information-sharing is to build herd immunity. We
can't possibly find all the software bugs faster than the attackers
can, much less patch them in time. Given that, the best we can do
right now on the defender side is to work together to build a sort of
immune system for the internet.

Now we all come to this community with our own prejudices, based on
our respective professional experiences and the various sectors we
represent. But while on the microscopic scale it may appear that our
goals are divergent, on the macro level I would argue that our goal is
unified: to pass on to the next generation a world in which our
children can put money in their savings account and sleep soundly,
confident that it will be there the next morning, a world in which our
children can board a plane with some assurance that hackers won't make
it fall out of the sky, and a world in which the normative nation
state relationships aren't thrust back a century due to the inability
of our culture to keep pace with technological development.

My hope is that we can move beyond our apparent differences to take a
meaningful, purposeful step in this direction. Our legacy is
ultimately not just a data model or another internet protocol but a
safer world.

-- 
Cheers,
Trey
--
Trey Darley
Senior Security Engineer
4DAA 0A88 34BC 27C9 FD2B  A97E D3C6 5C74 0FB7 E430
Soltra | An FS-ISAC & DTCC Company
www.soltra.com
--
"One size never fits all." --RFC 1925

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