Should Network Outages Remain Secret?

Miscellaneous

from the competing-interests dept

While some federal officials have been bugging companies to report network outages and security breaches, now others are suddenly worried that making any such info public would be a recipe for disaster as it would let “bad people” in on too much information. Thus, the new plan is not to make the info public, but that companies should report it to an organization that will tell the government, but otherwise keep it secret — as if they believe this will actually keep the information private. Basically, the new plan is to hope for security by obscurity while still letting the “people who matter” in on the secrets. That seems like the real recipe for disaster. The info won’t really be secret, and companies will have less incentive to really fix security and network problems.