🚀 go-pugleaf

Richard Schumacher writes:

> As has been pointed out elsewhere, the hacker has now cost the system
> owners/administrators their confidence in the security of their
> entire system.

Whoa, unless the hacker _changed_ something on the system, then the
hacker is not responsible for the loss of confidence:  It was a false
confidence to start with, and the hacker merely revealed it.  This is a
positive effect; it is better not to have confidence, to know of a
potential problem, than to have a false confidence, to be unaware of the
problem.

I'm not saying that breaking into a system is a good thing, just that the
loss of confidence isn't validly attributable to the hacker.

> Would the objectors like someone to point out the security holes in
> their apartments by breaking into them?)

No.  Nobody has stated that the value of learning security holes
overrides the costs of breaking in -- and that is all your example
addresses; it does not address the issue that learning of security holes
is valuable by itself.  Further, somebody breaking into an apartment is
unlikely to reveal a security hole not already known.

Eric Postpischil