My son’s apartment in Chicago was burglarized and ransacked over the weekend while he was here in Austin.  The thieves climbed up and forced the patio door.  It’s a reminder of the disparity between our perception of security and its reality.  Who among us is protected by more than a pane of glass and the fervent hope that someone is looking, listening and caring enough to intervene?  A locked door little deters a determined intruder.  Mostly, we stave off opportunistic threats of the sort that move on to easier pickings when the doors are locked and the lights are on.

In the context of data breach, I’ve often laughed at big companies who attribute intrusions to “ultra-sophisticated hackers and coordinated attacks.”  When you hear such claims, know they mean little with respect to the difficulty of the hack.  Big companies say such things because no one wants to admit that…