Breaches are more like plane crashes than car crashes
This was taken verbatim from LinkedIn post that I wrote in a fit of near-rage after seeing my 1000th vendor claim that human error causes most breaches. There’s more to say about this, and a more constructive way to say it, but perhaps another time.
Saying “most breaches are due to human error” is tired, ill-informed, unhelpful framing. If true, only on a technicality, and wildly misleading.
People make mistakes every day. Very, very few of the mistakes people make that are associated with security incidents are rare, unknown, or exceptional failure modes. They’re mostly things we know and expect to happen, but that we haven’t taken enough care to prevent (including not adding sufficient friction, where we can’t prevent the thing outright).
Got ransomware? Was the initial access vector email, specifically phishing? Was the root cause the user opening the email and falling for the lure? No way. Never. The root cause was the ability to run arbitrary code or software on a system, instead of using application control (mostly free, but admittedly free like a puppy, not like beer). Or maybe the root cause was lack of MFA or a lesser MFA implementation that isn’t sufficiently phishing resistant.
Breaches are more like plane crashes than car crashes: They don’t happen in an instant. A number of things have to go wrong, and a number of opportunities to avoid or lessen the impact have to be missed.
Implying that one of these things is primarily to blame mischaracterizes the problem, and shows a general lack both understanding of how breaches occur, and of basic systems thinking.
