Fighting security threats

Viktor Farcic: How do we fight security threats, if we can at all? A single person can do serious damage by exploiting our system vulnerabilities. How many people, if you can even put a number on it, do we need to prevent that person from attacking us?

Nirmal Mehta: That's all we've come up so far with, isn't it: how do we pay for the problem? How many people? That's because everything is reactionary.

There's more to this problem though. The core of security in IT leverages that same power that allows our modern technology companies to do amazing things with 100 or 1,000 fewer people than ever before. But here's the rub: that ability for technology to so dramatically increase the leverage of a single person also works for the person attacking you.

It's the same problem we have with terrorism. It costs 500 bucks for someone to become a suicide bomber, but it costs 1.5 trillion dollars to prevent that suicide bombing...