Bruce Schneier Systems Quotations

What will happen when the CFO looks at his premium and realizes that it will go down 50 percent if he gets rid of all his insecure Windows operating systems and replaces them with a secure version of Linux? The choice of which operating system to use will no longer be 100 percent technical, ... Microsoft, and other companies with shoddy security, will start losing sales because companies don't want to pay the insurance premiums.

People often represent the weakest link in the security chain and are chronically responsible for the failure of security systems.

History has taught us: never underestimate the amount of money, time, and effort someone will expend to thwart a security system. It's always better to assume the worst. Assume your adversaries are better than they are. Assume science and technology will soon be able to do things they cannot yet. Give yourself a margin for error. Give yourself more security than you need today. When the unexpected happens, you'll be glad you did.

A colleague once told me that the world was full of bad security systems designed by people who read Applied Cryptography