OK – what are you more afraid of – sharks or cows? Well, according to the folks at Popular Mechanics (via blog Boing Boing), it is the crazed bovine death machines which are the real threat:
Between 2003 and 2008, 108 people died from cattle-induced injuries across the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s 27 times the whopping four people killed in shark attacks in the United States during the same time period, according to the International Shark Attack File.
It seems to me that information security risks are a lot like sharks and cows. We infosec professionals love to talk about, hunt and defend against sharks, like zero-day vulnerabilities, state sponsored cyber-weapons, and other exotic threats. However, it is the cows of the infosec world, like unpatched software, misconfigured systems and devices, human errors, and users falling for malware laden links or emails, that are much more likely to result in a system compromise.
When making decisions about where to put our limited infosec funds and resources, we need to decide whether the threat we are defending against is a shark or a cow. Let’s take care of the cows first – before they take care of us. Then we can have some fun and hunt the sharks!
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