> Instead, most software is made by people with the philosophy of “if it looks like it works, ship it”.

I work in secure systems and it’s shocking how many people believe this - the incentives from management are all about it too.

I'd argue the management has a point there; without a pressure to ship, nothing would ever get released, because computer security has not yet understood the basic concepts that every non-computer security work does:

- nothing is, can be, or even should be 100% secure; the optimal rate of security incidents in society is not 0 (with apologies to 'patio11)

- security is a simultaneous trade-off against costs and usability, and those two other factors are more important:

-- security is achieved primarily through raising costs for attackers to beyond profitability, and reducing impact of such attacks (due to "not in isolation from the world" below, this also mostly translates to costs)

-- if "properly secured" (in the current cybersecurity sense) product/service cannot fulfill its function anymore, then you may just as well not make it; either way, no point in paying you for security work

- security isn't done in isolation from other systems and the world at large; "if this happens we'll go straight to filing crime report with the police" is perfectly legitimate security measure (even if it works somewhat less well on the Internet); similarly, "this is secured by us having insured against it" is also a valid solution to some security problems

It's not as if best practices aren't well documented, or as if CVEs don't come out every day, or as if the information is somehow unavailable to even the most junior devs to take basic security measures.

Not all hacks are caused by pure negligence, laziness or stupidity, but most of them are. Even a little effort goes a long way.

My grandfather spent a couple decades as a builder, ran a construction crew. Whatever the project was, he wanted to know everyone he hired personally was going to reinforce and report to him anything they had the slightest doubt about. "Always hammer in an extra nail" was basically his motto.

What we do ain't that different. The difference is that when an apartment building collapses, it's bigger news than when a govenrment database does.

The incentives from society are all about it. What company has ever faced serious consequences for hacks or data leaks? A cheap fine is just an unlucky cost of business.

I like to think behind every Dev anxious to ship half baked software sits an omniscient middle manager with a vague idea of what the product was supposed to do, maybe

I believe the technical term is “Move fast, and break things.” MVP is a huge disaster. I can see it working for applications that don’t process PID, but only an idiot ships data handling software before it’s been dragged through a lot of testing. I tested my app for two years, before finalizing, and an LLM still found a couple of holes (minor ones, but ones I missed).

After the DOGE debacle, I suspect that all the previously really secure stuff, is now out there, too. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if some of these leaks, came from that.

FBI employee data is very bad.