IT security has a lot in common with the meat-packing plants of 150 years ago or sailing a ship across the oceans in the 1700s, said Gene Kim, chief technology officer of Tripwire, in a speech Thursday at The Internet Security . . .
IT security has a lot in common with the meat-packing plants of 150 years ago or sailing a ship across the oceans in the 1700s, said Gene Kim, chief technology officer of Tripwire, in a speech Thursday at The Internet Security Conference here.

Both situations were dangerous, unhygienic, led to a lot of accidents, and forced people to accept what should have been unacceptable conditions in order to achieve their goals -- and IT security is no different, he said. Such conditions were necessary in days of yore, especially in navigation, because better tools and technologies weren't available to do the required tasks. Though computer security is much like that now, it needn't be, Kim said.

Computer security is a complicated and tricky field because systems can be catastrophically damaged through innocent mistakes made by employees, and restoring affected systems isn't easy, Kim said. IT and security workers are stuck with hard-to-manage, easy-to-damage systems, in part because they are growing faster than the techniques needed to manage them.

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