September 14, 2005

A leading academic has warned that today's IT technology is inherently vulnerable to security breaches of all kinds and it represents a growing and very persistent problem. Invariably, increasing the complexity of these systems will simply worsen these security risks on an even larger scale.

Users should rebel and demand vendors compensate them for security foul-ups, said pugnacisous Professor Klaus Brunnstein of the University of Hamburg.

Brunnstein told delegates to an IT security conference in London on Wednesday that attempting to protect against IT risks - such as hacking attacks - by increasing the complexity of systems is futile. "That would be like trying to expel the devil with Beelzebub," he said.

The present wave of IT security incidents is caused by inherently insecure assumptions, including overly complex systems. The interoperation of these systems with other insecure technologies magnifies the problem, the applied informatics academic argued.

He said more secure technologies will only be developed after a fundamental rethink involving building security into applications rather than adding it as an afterthought. Beyond saying that applications shouldn't delete valuable data when they failed, Brunnstein failed to elaborate on this key point preferring instead to criticise suppliers for resisting change.

Brunnstein called on user groups to rebel and lobby for customer protection laws and compensation for security failures. "Manufacturers must be made to pay for damages. Certainly Microsoft has made enough money to do so," Brunnstein said.

The professor made his comments during a keynote presentation at the Gartner IT Security Summit conference in London on Wednesday.

Source: The Register

Save Internet Security.ca's URL to the list of your favorite web sites in your Web browser by clicking here.

Become an authorized reseller of Proxy Sentinel™ and Firewall Sentinel™. Do like the rest of our authorized resellers and have your clients benefit the important security features of our products and solutions, while increasing your sales at the same time. Click here for all the details.

You can link to the Internet Security web site as much as you like. Read our section on how your company can participate in our reciprocal link exchange program and increase your rankings in the major search engines such as
Google and all the others.