As it turns out, students in the many fields of IT such as software development are still being taught the lessons of old and not being taught how to pro-actively design software to defend itself from attack. This is the result of a recent survey which shows that many programmers and developers to be are not getting ample courses in integrating security into their systems. They are left to fend for themselves and have to rely on patches to overcome development bugs that could have been fixed before they became problems in the first place.
I started out as a programmer in the glory days of FoxPro and C++ and such events that we have now are non-existent or are not as malicious as they are now. Back then, they simply messed up the display of garbled the contents of a floppy with no bearing on Phishing or Vishing and the myriad of stuff today’s malware do. Security has become such an issue with development that people today have to rely on anti-viruses and other intrusion prevention systems for their systems to remain reliable. Incorporating more security into applications would prevent weaknesses even if bugs are present in the program for no system is totally fool-proof. We would still need these intrusion protection systems yet not as highly dependent on them for basic security needs.
Most companies rely on million dollar contracts with software developers who design software to protect their software, McAfee, Symantec and many other security software developers have shifted focus more on intrusion prevention and less on anti-viruses for today’s malware have gotten to a level of sophistication that they can self-modify themselves to elude anti-virus programs of the past. Integrating encryption and other security provisions into the software itself may take longer but it would provide a level of security that hackers would not find easy to break. Education is the key and knowledge is power, so giving the next generation of developers the knowledge to incorporate security greatly increases the level of power over these malicious programs and the hackers who make them.