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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.
The internet is not a society of any sort though, any expectation of trust that broad is just idiocy. The moment you connect a device to the internet, it's full PvP. Until the ingroup is all of internet connected humanity, any network enabled software will have some North Korean sweatshop or misanthropic scumbag looking to mess with it.
Yeah, and? I think you're mostly just proving my point for me. The more of them there are the worse things get. It's not all or nothing. An internet with 10,000,000 PvP hackers is worse than an internet with 1,000,000 PvP hackers, is worse than an internet with 100,000 PvP hackers. Every single hacker contributes to making the internet a slightly worse place. More subtle flaws in more niche places will get exploited faster with additional scumbags.
Similarly, a community with 0.1% shoplifters might have stores just ignore them and eat the cost. A community with 1% shoplifters might lock up valuable items or hire security guards (raising prices to meet the excess demand). A community with 10% shoplifters is going to have stores close up and seek opportunities elsewhere, turning into a food dessert. Each scumbag contributes to making things a worse place for everyone else.
My point isn't that you should "expect" people to be good, in terms of predicting that they will be good. My point is that bad people are still bad even when you expect them and prepare for them. Their predictability does not negate their badness, it only allows you to mitigate it. Therefore they are still bad.
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