I was out to dinner with my parents the other night and my mother started getting on my case. You know, the way mothers do.
“Kenneth.”
Yes, I’m a grown man and my mother still calls me Kenneth when she’s angry with me.
“I’ve been reading the paper and there are all these security problems all the time. Aren’t you supposed to be fixing this? There must be something you can do to stop it. It seems like quite a problem.”
Mothers. How is it that they can bundle up a wonderful compliment (I’m capable of fixing it) with a sort of backhanded insult (I’m too lazy to bother fixing it) and throw some guilt on top (security breaches are apparently my fault)?
Which leads me to explaining to my mother (who’s 70), why it’s not fixed yet.
“Look, Mom, if I had some kind of box I could sell people that would make this all go away, I surely would. And I would be rich like Elvis and buy you a big white Cadillac. But, sorry, no such box exists.”
“Here’s the problem. We used know what attacks looked like, and we would look for them and stop them. Now the hackers are smarter. They know what we’re looking for so they make sure their attacks look different.”
“Given this, there’s only one way to look for bad things. We have to know what good things look like and find the things that aren’t good. We have to know what normal looks like. Then we can find the hackers.”
“Some of this can be pretty easy. If your firewall is communicating on a regular basis with North Korea and you don’t have any customers there, that’s not normal. But most of it is pretty hard. Most companies are so large and complicated they really have no understanding of what normal looks like.”
“They do business in dozens of countries and have thousands of applications. It’s very difficult to normalize.”
“So, that’s the problem. Does that make sense?”
Unfortunately, this didn’t really help. My mother must have been a Fortune 500 CEO in her last life.
She simply said, “Sounds like a load of excuses to me. Blah, Blah, Normal. Please just fix it so I can use my credit card on the Internet again.”