Security and Processes

Back about 15 years, I remember doing my first Linux installation. I remember I had been fairly paranoid about it because I'd always seen friends hacking each others systems with the basic exploits on those "enable everything with no firewall" installs of the day. I had enlisted a friend to help secure the system and monitored everything he did to the system to lock it down, removing suid bits, commenting out services in inetd.conf, etc. I thought at the time the end game for security was anticipating everything you friends could do and issue some command to prevent it. Generally, the systems were pretty closed off single user systems save for the friends you'd give a shell account to that would be your trouble makers.

As a career, security is almost the exact same. The big difference is that there are more attackers and a lot more users in between. That's where all the complexity comes in. The attackers can (and are), just go after your trusted users and the users just want to focus on their non-security concerns. The hard part of organization security a balancing act where you want to find what the users can tolerate and compensate as much as possible. Much different to make security decisions and policies than the days where you could just say "who the heck uses discard/comment it out".