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https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/french-supermarket-chains-cyberattack-forced-115141288.html
This is a poetry of stupid and the hackers are the least guilty party here. Lets start with the obvious. Why freezers needs to be visible, why do they need to be remotely managed, why is not this done on dedicated internal network, why do they need firmware updates. How did we get to the point where a device that should be pid controller, compressor and alarm can be hacked.
To make you feel better - all of your nice EVs are also permanently connected and I doubt that there is air gap between the infotainment and the firmware of the battery pack. Someday someone will be able to accelerate or set on fire EV remotely. And probably soon.
I despise this framing, and it is obviously false. The most guilty party in any situation is always the actual guilty party. When a women walks down a dark alley in skimpy clothing and gets raped, the most guilty party is the rapist. When a farm sets out an unattended stand with fresh produce and a box to put money in and someone comes and steals everything, the most guilty party is the thief. When a supermarket doesn't put locks on their toothpaste and someone comes and shoplifts a bunch of toothpaste, the most guilty party is the shoplifter. When someone puts refrigerators on the internet and they get hacked, the most guilty party is the hacker.
Yes, you need to be vigilant and aware that bad people exist and take precautions to protect yourself from them. If someone is in a low trust environment where bad people are prevalent, it is irresponsible and negligent not to take precautions, and anyone who fails to do so does share some of the blame for the obvious outcome where the bad people harm them. But they share less than half of the blame, because if the bad people didn't exist then obviously no harm would happen at all and the precautions wouldn't be necessary. There is a finite amount of blame to distribute, and the majority always belongs with the bad people who actually do bad things.
Yes. The sysadmin. IT security with minimal exceptions[1] always had serious component of victim blaming in the 90s.
The difference with the rest of your scenarios is that in IT there was never trust which could be betrayed. Everyone knew from the beginning that everyone is out to get you. There was never presumption of safety on the internet.
So a better analogy is who is to blame when a soldier dies on the battlefield - the enemy shooter or the soldier that didn't take cover?
[1] Technically illiterate activists in the third world and the likes.
You're missing the point. Low trust societies are worse than high trust societies, because even when you take all of the appropriate security measures, those measures inherently come with costs and friction that wouldn't be necessary if there weren't untrustworthy people around. The actual perpetrators are the people directly inflicting all of the costs, both the damages when they get away with something and the security costs when people move to stop them. The naive people are indirectly responsible for the costs caused by insufficient security measures. If they weren't naive OR if there weren't scumbags around, they wouldn't get sabotaged so drastically, but no matter how cynical they are there's nothing they can do to prevent the security costs and friction forced upon them by the scumbags. There's a clear asymmetry here.
I wonder if the issue is just treating criminals as sub-human or something, the fargroup, and thus absolving them of responsibility because you're not even being thinking of them as rational agents in the interaction. They're not just some environment, like wandering into the woods and getting mauled by a bear. They're people and thus deserve blame when they inflict harm.
I think you are missing my point. To commit crime you have to have law, the DNA of the internet was always lawlessness and anarchy. It started as a warzone. The fact that meatspace has claimed control and thinks its rules apply - doesn't change the nature of the place. Hackers are not criminals - internet was created to be unrulable - well it was created to be undisruptable, but the two kinda go together. So the burden is on the defender, by default. In the real world you have the whole monopoly of violence thing that says rape is not ok. Internet was designed so that monopoly of violence is impossible. Well the governments figured this one clever trick that if they can put chokepoints and match your digital to physical identity they could break your kneecaps. But still.
Arguably the same was true in so-called meatspace for a lot of human history (or pre-history, if you prefer). Back in the day, it was arguably completely normal and unremarkable to raid a neighboring tribe, kill everyone there with the exception of a few people to be taken as slaves, etc. Since then, norms have arisen providing that the law of the jungle no longer applies in the case of physical human interaction. And we are all a lot better off as a result.
Simply put, human society started as a warzone as well. To a large extent we've gotten beyond that and in my opinion there's no reason the same thing shouldn't happen in cyberspace.
Because for that to happen you need to disable out of country communications, encryption, running unsigned software and to have state firewalls that will inspect every packet.
I think your argument here is that the proposed norms of behavior I am referring to are impracticable. (Please feel free to correct me if I misunderstood.) And to that I would respond that in the physical world there are millions of crimes committed every year, many of which go unsolved and unpunished. Nevertheless, it would be silly to just throw up our hands as a society and go back to the law of the jungle. Because we are still far better off.
Assume that we have a world in which death notes are common. France's laws can't protect you. How will you deal with the threat?
The default assumption about meatspace states is that they control a physical space, have the only say what goes in there, control the inputs and outputs. And because to commit a meatspace crime you have to be in physical proximity to the victim - it means you are at least nominally under said state power. And this arrangement works well and is easy to understand. You kill a man in Reno just to watch him die and then you go to Folsom. To commit a crime you have to overcome the state.
What does the death note change - that you could kill a man in Reno from Uganda, but there is no way the crime can be traced to you (or prevented). You totally bypass the state. In that world dying by death note because you showed your face or told someone your real name - will be classified as death by natural causes - aka stupidity.
Hacking is inevitable feature of the internet. To be able to prevent and police crimes you have to be able to control all of the infrastructure. And this is where my argument comes into play - if the state is incapable by definition to secure the cyberspace - then it is up to the sysadmins - because they have total control over what goes in their networks.
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