Fergie's Tech Blog

Securing The Wrong Spaces: A Lesson

Mike Masnick writes over on techdirt.com:

A brand new Japanese warship that apparently has the country's latest and greatest radar system, was unable to spot a fishing boat in its path, leading to a collision and two missing fishermen. This is raising all sorts of questions about the quality of the radar system, but some are saying that the collision was really due to human error and that the radar system is designed more to watch out for missiles in the air, rather than ships below it.

That's a fair enough response, but does point out that vulnerabilities come from all directions -- and you can make the best system in the world, but if it's looking for the wrong thing, it won't stop something bad from getting through. It does seem rather ironic to set this ship up to be the best in the world at spotting threats from the sky -- and forget to include a decent system to find threats right next to it in the sea.

More here.

Note: There is a great security lesson to be learned here -- if you're focused on securing only a subset of the entire threat landscape, the insecurities will generally occur in the places you're not focusing on. Focus on the Big Picture. -ferg

posted by Fergie @ 2/20/2008 10:58:00 PM