nobody confident in their own abilities is panicking

[viss@mastodon.social]

@krypt3ia @acdha maybe i should clarify

i am very specifically referring to people who:
- do not have a technical background
- were formally hair dressers or coffeeshop folks, or oil changers
- who took 1 bootcamp class, or 1 'masters' course, and now want to be leadership or senior redteamers
- these people flatly cannot function without their crutches
- they should never ever have been let to be in charge of shit

[krypt3ia@infosec.exchange]

@Viss @acdha And yet, here we are.

[viss@mastodon.social]

@krypt3ia @acdha its because "you can buy your way into infosec". i even did a talk on it

[krypt3ia@infosec.exchange]

@Viss @acdha Buying certs and those who are paper tigers working in the field are all symptoms of "business"

[viss@mastodon.social]

@cR0w @da_667 thats another big angle too

2 years ago at securityfest i was at lunch and another presenter showed up. some js/npm guy. he laughed and gloated that he doesnt ever need to give a shit about the network or the OS because who cares? his js shit works and thats all that mattered. he openly flaunted being ignorant about how the shit that makes his entire world function is lame and he doesnt care about it.

its that kinda sentiment right there, that installs the rot

[viss@mastodon.social]

@krypt3ia @acdha i refer to it as 'the bureaucratic plumbing', but yep

[krypt3ia@infosec.exchange]

@Viss @acdha It burns for those who got into this as an avocation.

[jackryder@infosec.exchange]

@cR0w @Viss @da_667

"The requirements.txt is 1267 lines?"

We want to be sure...

[cr0w@infosec.exchange]

@jackryder @Viss @da_667 Even the fact that everything runs on GPOSs like Windows because it's easy is bad. Keep it fucking simple. Why should orgs have to mitigate so many vulns in services they don't want and don't need? Because it's easier for "engineers?" GTFO.

[jackryder@infosec.exchange]

@cR0w @Viss @da_667 I've had that convo!

"We don't have resources to do it safely" is such a strange take for an organization that exists in the real world.

Timelines suck, vendors are charming, shareholders have crazy requests. It's a terrible cycle.

But cheating the cycle is lazy and just erodes the efforts of others.

[hal_pomeranz@infosec.exchange]

@cR0w @jackryder @Viss @da_667 Because it’s easier to support if everything is installed and turned on by default. You don’t get pesky users calling saying, “Why isn’t this working?” Fewer support calls saves money.

We were fighting this battle in the OS during my Center for Internet Security days back in the early 2000s and made some progress as far as default installs. But entropy is gonna entropy.

[rrb@infosec.exchange]

@Viss What I am not confident in is the ability of tech CEOs to prioritize delivering products that are not pure shit.

Delivering quality vs. delivering pure crap at a much lower cost?

[drahardja@sfba.social]

@Viss The real victims here are the juniors and people recently entering a new field. LLMs teach you nothing (you have to do the learning yourself, like you always do), yet they give the illusion of productivity. The game is rigged so that junior devs are rewarded for pretending to gain understanding, when all they do is lean on the LLMs and hope they don’t fuck up.

[deedasmi@mastodon.online]

@Viss Hey now, Claude found an SQL injection in my code and I like to think I have a pretty good practice of secure coding.

It thinks the statically typed i32 is an injection vulnerability and wants to fix it with more than a hundred lines of crud because it doesn’t understand how to make parameterized statements in my SQL library. It also made all of that crud public API in ways it could easily be called out of order and make new state issues. But that’s exactly the point.

[thomasareed@infosec.exchange]

@Viss When I got into security something like 15 years ago, it was so different. At that time, in the Mac community, I could make a difference, and do meaningful things. That’s so much harder to do now, with so many stupid, bureaucratic roadblocks, and I’m glad I’m looking at a career in the security industry in the rear view mirror.

[theorangetheme@en.osm.town]

@Viss @cR0w @da_667 People who have contempt for everything outside of their overengineered virtual machine really grind my gears, because when their abstraction inevitably leaks, this sclerotic industry will prevent them from suffering the consequences of their actions. But I ran into people like this ten years ago. LLMs just kicked the dilettantism into hyperdrive.

[catsalad@infosec.exchange]

@Viss "Oh you know IOS? Which one–the fruit or the trash fire?"

[jackeric@beige.party]

@catsalad @Viss @jackryder
obligatory https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWFrgjFb56E

[rayendumeldust@sueden.social]

@catsalad @Viss what's my uptime again?

[neurovagrant@masto.deoan.org]

@Viss getting supremely annoyed at that headline and how much bullshit it's carrying