Partially correct. Cybersecurity is broken because there are no consequences, but cybersecurity is not broken because there is no money in it. Large corporations spend literal mountains of money on cybersecurity, but cybersecurity is broken, so that money is basically wasted. Literally go ask any CISO or cybersecurity director at any Fortune 500 company: "How much would it cost to hire hackers to compromise our the systems of our company with billions of dollars of revenue and take down operations?" Keep asking that until they give you a literal monetary number. I have never heard a number over 1 M$ by anybody who knows anything. None of the big 4 banks, who literally spend hundreds of millions to billions of dollars, gave a number over 100 k$. If they give you a number over 1 M$, ask if you can make a open prize at Defcon so they can prove it, they will be shaking in their little boots.<p>Cybersecurity technology is, as a rule, useless. And it is also worthless since there have been no meaningful consequences to date. Large companies pay huge piles of moneys so the CEO and Board of Directors can say they spent a lot of money so they, personally, have plausible deniability when their systems get breached. Then the lack of actual business consequences kicks in and everybody is happy after the PR blip passes over. Optics are, in fact, more important than security for large companies which is why heavy spenders look so broken. It does not need to actually work, it just needs to look good to outsiders so they do not get a phantom PR hit (it is a phantom from their perspective since there are no actual business consequences, there may be other consequences but that is outside of their evaluation criteria).<p>The only actually meaningful and cost-effective "preventative" measure is doing the bare minimum of standard IT practices (i.e. keep things up to date, keep backups, etc.) to prevent amateurs from crippling your systems. Against professionals, no commercial IT solution works, so you are better off just purchasing cybersecurity insurance. You should only waste money on the standard cybersecurity garbage if you need to slough off liability. In every other way it is just plain useless; it provides no meaningful increase in security and costs a ton to boot. This is why small companies look so broken, nothing works and they do not need the optics, so there is little point in spending money on things that do not work.<p>With the recent wave of mature, professional cybercriminals we are finally starting to see a little bit of a shift. The 18 year old hackers who thought 100 $ was a lot of money are now in their 30s running professional extortion companies. They are starting to ask for serious money and the consequences are starting to materialize. Unfortunately, we have an entire industry of snake oil and the rest of the economy is not ready for the consequences. It is already hitting the cybersecurity insurance companies who are rapidly going underwater because policies are backwards looking. The cyberattack industry is growing like 300% per year, so the premiums from 5 years ago, which assumed a expected value 243x lower, make no sense today, and the premiums today make no sense next year. Incidentally, this is why you should purchase as much long-term cybersecurity insurance as you can, it is massively underpriced given current trends (e.g. Maersk got a real steal with their 1 G$ payout which is probably more than the total premiums paid to all cybersecurity insurance companies put together over their entire existence at that time).<p>The problem is not money. It is working solutions. Money helps make working solutions as long as it goes to people making working solutions. But, so far, optics have been preferred over security due to the lack of consequences.<p>If we want working solutions, then we need systems verified to protect against the now commonplace attacks by professional attackers at the 10 M$+ range. As a first-order estimate, that is a team of 20 full-time for a year. That is the <i>minimum</i> bar. For large nationals or multinationals, you probably need to be in the 100 M$ to 1G$ range, 60 full-time for 3 years or 600 full-time for 3 years. Only then are we reasonably safe against sophisticated financially-motivated attackers.