April 9, 2008
People working in information security often quip that they are "paid to be paranoid." Recently, Bruce Schneier expanded on this theme in an article originally entitled "Inside the Twisted Mind of the Security Professional." Security professionals, Schneier writes, see the world differently:
They can't walk into a store without noticing how they might shoplift. They can't use a computer without wondering about the security vulnerabilities. They can't vote without trying to figure out how to vote twice. They just can't help it.
This kind of thinking is unnatural for most people, Schneier believes, but can be of great value both for the individual and for society: if there were more of it, there would be fewer laptops lost with unencrypted confidential information on them, less identity theft, and fewer gullible people. It might even have helped the people we wrote about previously who were victims of ATM and fee fraud.
So take a few minutes in the next week to think paranoid thoughts. It just might do you good.