An Interview with William Hugh Murray – A discussion of the rapidly evolving realm of practical cyber security

William Hugh Murray

“What has changed over those years is not the need for security, but the risks and costs of insecurity. It should be clear to a casual reader of the news, let alone those with access to intelligence sources, that what we are doing is not working. It is both costly and dangerous.”

 

The profession of IT: An Interview with William Hugh Murray – A discussion of the rapidly evolving realm of practical cyber security
Communications of the ACM, March 2019, Vol. 62 No. 3, Pages 28-30
By Peter J. Denning

William Hugh (Bill) Murray is a management consultant and trainer in Information Assurance specializing in policy, governance, and applications. He has more than 60 years experience in information technology and more than 50 years in security. During more than 25 years with IBM his management responsibilities included development of access control programs, advising IBM customers on security, and the articulation of the IBM security product plan.

 

Bill Murray has been responding for years to security threats with nonconventional thinking. When he sees a security breakdown, he asks what is the current practice that allows the breakdown to happen, and what new practice would stop it? Most of our security vulnerabilities arise from poor practice, not from inadequate technology.

 

Many people today are concerned about cybersecurity and want to know how to protect themselves from malware, identity thieves, invading hackers, botnets, phishers, and more. I talked to Bill about what practices we have to deal with these issues, and where we need to look for new practices.

 

 

While these recommendations may represent a change in the way we are doing things, we know they work. There is little new in them. Most of these ideas are as old as computing and some we inherited from more primitive information technology. Most of the resistance to using these practices comes from loss of convenience. Good security is not convenient. But it is absolutely necessary for the security of our assets and the reliability of the many critical systems on which we all depend. We need not suffer from the scourge of systems that so easily succumb to invaders.

Read the article »