Unless there is willfull negligence (very difficult to prove) or malicious behavior I don't think putting people in jail will help. Most of this stuff happens by accident not by intent.

Financial consequences to the company might be a deterrent, of course then you're dealing with hundreds or thousands of people potentially unemployed because the company was bankrupted by something as simple as a mistake in a firewall somewhere or an employee falling victim to a social engineering trick.

I think the path is along the lines of admitting that cloud, SaaS and other internet-connected information systems cannot be made safe, and dramatically limiting their use.

Or, admitting that a lot of this information should be of no consequence if it is exposed. Imagine a world where knowing my name, SSN, DOB, address, mother's maiden name, and whatever else didn't mean anything.

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DanHulton 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

Imagine using this defence with regards to airline crashes. "The crashes happen by accident not by intent" would be a clearly ludicrous defence, as it ought to be here as well.

If we were serious about preventing these kinds of things from happening, we could.

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SoftTalker 5 days ago | parent [-]

If we're OK with regulating SaaS companies (and anyone who connects their information systems to the internet) the way we do the airline industry, that may be an argument.

Bottom line though a good many folks here would loudly resist that kind of oversight on their work and their busineses, and for somewhat valid reasons. Data breaches hardly ever cause hundreds of deaths in a violent fireball.

If the consequences of an airline crash were just some embarassment and some inconvenience for the passengers, they would happen a lot more.

Also people almost never go to jail for airline crashes, even when they cause hundreds of deaths. We investigate them, and maybe issue new regulations, not to punish mistakes, but to try to eliminate the possibilty of them happening again.

	▲	luckylion 5 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> Data breaches hardly ever cause hundreds of deaths in a violent fireball. Insurance people will be happy to tell you the price of the average citizen's life. Estimate the total cost to the economy, divide by the average citizen's life-value and you have the statistical deaths caused by this type of incident. Draw a fireball next to it for dramatic effect. But generally, I don't think _every_ SaaS needs to be tightly regulated. But everyone that handles customer data needs to be. It would also very quickly make them stop hovering up any data they can get their fingers on and instead would make them learn how to provide their services securely without even having access to the data, because having that data suddenly becomes a liability instead of an opportunity.
	▲	aaronmdjones 5 days ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		> We investigate them, and maybe issue new regulations, not to punish mistakes, This is not quite accurate. In the US for example, the NTSB investigates the causes of an incident, and the FAA carries out any subsequent enforcement action. Whereas the NTSB may rule the cause as pilot error due to negligence for example, the FAA may revoke the pilot's license and/or prosecute them in a civil case to the tune of a hundred thousand dollars and/or refer them to the Department of Justice for criminal prosecution.
	▲	eptcyka 5 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		At some point, some US department figured that they can practically budget a human life to cost around 10 million dollars - I wonder if the total amount of lives lost in airline incidents would incur the same amount of money lost as all the fraud that takes place after data breaches like these.

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fn-mote 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> Most of this stuff happens by accident not by intent.

Consider the intent of not hiring enough security staff and supporting them appropriately. It looks a lot like an accident. You could even say it causes accidents.

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SoftTalker 5 days ago | parent [-]

Hiring more people does not prevent the chance of mistakes. It may even increase them. I know places that spend lavishly on security (and employee education w/r/t social engineering, etc.) and have still been breached.

	▲	AlotOfReading 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Google and Apple spend lavishly on security and are probably the most heavily attacked companies in the world, often by nation-state adversaries. Yet as far as I can remember, neither has had a successful breach like this in well over a decade. Clearly it's possible.