It is tempting to believe that the security problem can be solved with yet more technical wizardry and a call for heightened vigilance. And it is certainly true that many firms still fail to take security seriously enough. That requires a kind of cultivated paranoia which does not come naturally to non-tech firms. Companies of all stripes should embrace initiatives like “bug bounty” programmes, whereby firms reward ethical hackers for discovering flaws so that they can be fixed before they are taken advantage of.
But there is no way to make computers completely safe. Software is hugely complex. Across its products, Google must manage around 2bn lines of source code—errors are inevitable. The average program has 14 separate vulnerabilities, each of them a potential point of illicit entry. Such weaknesses are compounded by the history of the internet, in which security was an afterthought (see article).
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