Net Zeros and Ones

Foreword

I titled my book If It's Smart, It's Vulnerable (Wiley, 2022). I first mentioned this fact during one of my talks, and the phrase took on a life of its own. Eventually, it became known as the Hypponen law. When we add functionality and connectivity to everyday devices, they become smart. At the very same time, they become vulnerable and hackable.

This concerns me, because smart devices all contain data. Ensuring that that data does not fall into the wrong hands is the topic of Net Zeros and Ones. The right to data erasure here in Europe has been codified in many privacy regulations, including GDPR. But the topic of data sanitization extends well beyond privacy and the handling of personal information.

Security, as the authors point out, is primarily about protecting data from theft, corruption, or even destruction. The last we have seen in many widespread attacks, for example with NotPetya, a worm released on Ukraine by Russia's military. Thousands of organizations have had to deal with ransomware over the last five years. Pernicious criminal gangs have learned to monetize the value we see in our own data by denying us access to it. They encrypt it and demand millions for the decryption keys or to prevent the criminals from leaking the data.

I have spent my career working in cybersecurity. When I started working at the Finnish security company F-Secure in 1991, we did not use the term cyber. It was just IT security. The history of this industry is often compared to ...