Comment by nullocator
3 hours ago
Is it more expensive to keep your systems upgraded and maintained or to have all your product get destroyed one arbitrary day and then have to pay to do the upgrade anyways so that the arbitrary property destruction doesn't keep happening?
In before "but insurance"; yes insurance can in theory mitigate some of this, but I feel like people on HN have no understanding what it's like to deal with a multi-million dollar insurance claim that the insurance company 100% does not want to pay out. The legal battles over such things take years and are on their own incredibly expensive.
> Is it more expensive to keep your systems upgraded and maintained or to have all your product get destroyed one arbitrary day and then have to pay to do the upgrade anyways so that the arbitrary property destruction doesn't keep happening?
It happened once. Did you do the maths here? Can you tell us which one was Kore expensive and what percentage chance there was of this hack happening?
Someone did the math. Cost of continual maintenance, versus cost of product loss. They determined it wasnt worth the maintenance cost, and accepted that risk. And that risk manifested.
This happens all the time. Unfortunately, in my experience, most of the risk acceptance happens without even really believing in the cost of the risk, and people just accept everything. it is highly likely someone like that accepted this.
The polite term is 'self-insurance', and it's often the right move.
That class of risk was just theoretical for decades, so the price on it was basically 0.
Now that we see large scale incidents will there be an actual money value associated with upgrading systems and security for supermarket appliances.
I think it's fair that the price up until now has been mostly zero. On the other hand you can 10+ years of examples on HN of people saying these types of threats with IoT devices and internet connected industrial hardware are not theoretical and it's shocking they weren't being exploited more often.
I can find 10+ years of examples on HN of people saying all kinds of stuff, and it's shocking how outlandish that so much of it is.
In my recent experience (last 3 months) with a cyber claim getting insurance to pay out was actually pretty straightforward. It was about a $250K USD loss on a phishing attempt (someone hijacked and rerouted payment details for a wire)