The Digital Big Bang

14HUMAN FRAILTY

“We can't stop people from making mistakes. We need technology solutions in place to compensate.”

Kevin Kealy, Ingram Micro

“We fail to design for the human and instead we design around the human.”

Theresa Payton, Fortalice

You might think that a book whose premise is “Start treating cybersecurity like a science” wouldn't have room for a discussion about the so-called “soft stuff”: The human brain, the three pounds of flesh and blood that serve as the “wetware” behind all the thoughts in this book and recorded history. But it is not software or hardware that's gotten us this far.

Too often, though, in cybersecurity, the soft stuff is the hard stuff. As we have seen over the course of this book, there is no way to entirely remove human frailty from technology innovations. Human weakness is embedded like a strand of DNA in everything we do and achieve. In the parlance of our times, there is not an app for that.

More than anything else, human fallibility is the truth and fuel that powers cybercrime. No matter how sophisticated our cybersecurity efforts, there will always be some aspect of our human frailty that can be exploited. But perhaps that fact is what also powers our relentless drive to innovate and improve our conditions. As Shakespeare wrote in Julius Caesar, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars/But in ourselves.” To which I would add that ...