It is human nature to be drawn towards scary, complex issues. However, a lot of the answers to the problems we’re facing now lay in challenges we’ve faced in the past. Look at the recent issues surrounding Solarwinds. Supply chain attacks have been well addressed in the past, yet in that incident we saw how the impact of one small part of the chain rolled on to become a threat to a huge number of companies and Government organisations.
The basics of cybersecurity came into play here, as some disclosures showed that Solarwinds had been told that credentials for its software update server had been exposed in a public GitHub repository, where a researcher said files could be uploaded. This was because the password was stored in plaintext and was “a textbook example of a weak password that never should have been allowed.”