Mistakes in code are known to cause bugs and those bugs are known to cause security vulnerabilities. We also know other vulnerabilities are by design mistakes, setup/configuration mistakes or someone giving away access. Therefore humans are the cause for all the cyber security issues. So how do we secure an imperfect world?
What proof is there that humans error? Have humans accepted that to error is human? Through experience and kids you see lots of mistakes but that doesn’t mean to error is human. So we got alot of people to do an attention to detail test (You can find some free online), and we found in the group and the tricky test we used, everyone made mistakes. It actually surprised many as they thought they would not make a mistake.
Alexander Pope, poet of the Enlightenment, lent a famous line from his 1711 treatise An Essay on Criticism to the US Institutes of Medicine’s report on patient safety: To Err is Human. The remainder of the line, “to forgive divine,” would have further reinforced the report’s message. Those who made mistakes should neither be blamed nor punished, it argues, instead, to look at the system.
So if we assume on average humans will error between 1% to 5%, then we need to setup the correct systems and processes so the human error element won’t impact the output or can be detected and fixed.
In Cyber Security these processes involve lots of things including peer review, external audit, penetration testing, code scanning, cyber training, layers of protections and so forth.
If you are looking to reduce the vulnerabilities being implemented in your business due to human error, have a chat with the Cyber Experts at Vertex Cyber Security.
