Nearly a year ago, we hosted Dug Song, the legendary founder of Duo Security, on Inside the Network. During that conversation, Dug shared a powerful analogy that has stuck with me. He explained that in aviation, a plane crashes the same way only once, or maybe twice. Whenever it happens, we get to the bottom of the failure by analyzing black boxes, and then the entire systems and plane designs change to prevent the same failure from ever happening again. In security, it’s a different story. Organizations get breached the same way over and over, and oftentimes the same company gets breached for the same reason many times. Dug described this as a “Groundhog Day in the worst possible sense”, a hamster wheel of pain where we’re not actually getting better, just reliving the same incidents again and again.

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I think most of us feel Dug’s pain, and, unfortunately, we have to go through this Groundhog Day what feels like every single week. I most definitely agree with the sentiment Dug expressed, but I don’t agree with the analogy. It took me a while to realize why that is the case, so in this issue, I am talking about reasons why it doesn’t make any sense to draw parallels between safety and security.

The well-loved seatbelts analogy is sadly not relevant

People in security absolutely love to bring up the story of how seatbelts redefined road safety (if you’re not sure what I am talking about, here’s an example of how CISA compares its Secure by Design Pledge to the initiatives in the automotive and aviation industries).

The ...