July 08, 2003
Dangerous Maps
The digital security industry has long understood that security through obscurity is almost always a temporary solution and never a solution that can be relied on. The rest of the world has yet to figure this out. According to the Washington Post a grad student has created a map of all US businesses and the physical communications links that connect them. Federal security types are aghast - even Richard Clarke, the erstwhile former counter-terrorism czar commented that the map should be burned... Seriously who is he kidding?
Maps are valuable. This one makes it very easy to determine where the weak points in our nation's communication systems lie - which means maybe we should be using it as a basis for building the redundancy and security that many customers thought they were buying all along. This map creates a body of information we should have had long ago - who cares if it exposes some poor decisions that were made along the way. It exposes the numerous places where communication lines are shared, mixed, and connected - leaving us with another reminder that in many cases it is impossible to tell where one entity stops and another begins. In cyberspace the perimeter is dead. We are all connected - which means the psychopath that lives on the other side of the planet might as well live next store.