Defensive Security and Olive Badger

The next episode is out! See Episode 344.

First story: ComputerWeekly: Emergency Microsoft, Oracle patches point to wider cyber issues. I think I used to write for that publication in Hong Kong in 1990,... 

Third story: The Hacker News: The Hidden Cost of Cybersecurity Specialization: Losing Foundational Skills. 

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My comment:

We can completely rethink the way we use personal data. Most of the time none of that personal data is in active use. It is just there "in case someone needs it" most of it is never needed, so why does it need to exist as a separate copy on a cloud server volume somewhere? Instead you could store a token which represents a commitment by the person to provide some data item, such as their date of birth, on request. Then if the company needs to verify their age it can just use that commitment token to do it, it never actually needs to know their date of birth. Similarly, it doesn't need their name or address either, nor their social security number. So all you store is a bunch of commitment tokens which are effectively anonymised. You can even extend this to payment and shipping. There is no need for Amazon to know your name and address or credit card number. It just needs a commitment token from your bank and one from your chosen delivery endpoint. Then when the parcel arrives at the point of delivery you can identify yourself and collect it. So why don't we do this? That's a good question. It seems to be because nobody wants to know how to do these things, and according to my friends at the University of Cambridge, you can't teach someone something unless you first make them want to know it. But then it's kind of funny how you can make them do exams in regular languages and finite automata and learn the proof of the Pumping Lemma,...

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See Defensive Security in the Movies and for a better way to do it, Robert Elder - World Domination Day #347.