buildings may be quite hard to destroy, but the relevant question is whether it is proportionally harder to build one.

required codes and standards may raise one (difficulty of removal) or both (difficulty of removal + difficulty of construction) in varying proportion.

In the physical sense, entropy favors the attacker because destroying something is just helping it along the path it wants to take. Everything wants to turn into dust, all the time. It takes energy to prevent it from happening. The attacker can use significantly less energy to get it moving.

Consider the energy requirements to construct a skyscraper compared to the energy requirements to demolish one.

Well, I don't want to get on the capital E - engineering tangent regarding software. But yeah, agreed on that. In most cases, we have been vibe engineering software this whole time.

Tangent aside, entropy favors the attacker even in the case of a building that has PE stamps on the plans and passes all codes at time of construction. Just leave it alone for a while with no maintenance, it will fall. Or, hire one man to correctly place charges. Far less work than what it took to build it.

edit: I want to make clear that what amazes me is how hard we fight entropy. We have built fragile societies, fragile technologies, we ourselves are fragile. And yet, humans are generally pretty cool and choose not to destroy all of these things, though we do have a few assholes amongst us.

“It’s easy to destroy a building than to build one” is still true, building codes or not.

I mean for just the EU you have:

Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) and Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) which enforce mandatory governance and processes like resilience testing and cybersecurity lifecycle requirements.

GDPR & Data Protection frameworks which requires architecture to support CRUD operations on all PII, data minimization, customer-managed encryption architectures and so forth.

...and the anti-vibe code framework aka the EU AI Act, which requires human oversight and data quality controls.

This is completely aside from any industry specific engineering codes like in Finance where you have to adhere to things like ISO 20022 or iXBRL/ESEF standards, user accessibility mandates, and PCI Compliance mandates for things like Security Architecture over and above the CRA.

Per the IRA after an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Thatcher, "Today we were unlucky, but remember we have only to be lucky once, you will have to be lucky always."

> It is not a base truth.

When you operate in an environment where every "good boy" can be wiped by a single "oh shit", statistics are against you. That is a base truth. The failure can rest on negligence but negligence isn't a necessary component for failure. For attackers their failures are wiped by a single success, for defenders their successes are wiped by a single failure.

In a different life I worked on designing and implementing similar systems to the ones you described, except with even more money going through them. They can can still be hacked, at incredible expense. And the hackers could even make a huge profit with the treasure trove they have access to. But getting away with it is orders of magnitude more difficult than the hack. The money involved to make the hack profitable is impossible to hide on the world stage. It takes a lot of political capital and military to be able to steal billions+++ and get away with it (nation state attackers, not just a group of hackers). So hackers go for lower risk jobs where the payout can even be similar just because of the lower cost to succeed.

Yeah but you know there trade offs like free society, freedom of movement, privacy and stuff that you need to sacrifice to take advantage of home turf. And you need to do this everywhere. Attacker can pick his targets on his own schedule, you need to defend always.

[dead]

One of the most spectacular pieces of self-own for the current administration. Restructuring/deleting the directorate for biodefense during the previous administration (of the same color) would be up there.

> 18F was completely eliminated

18F -> https://ndstudio.gov

As seen credited on recent publications like real realfood.gov.