Google's Security Glitch

How do you take down The Google? They have lots of data centers, gobs of bandwidth, unrivaled peering, and a scary amount of compute power. A DDOS from your pimply nephew's botnet won't get the job done. The one force in the universe able to tackle The Google head on? Google Security! Their list of malicious web sites is so powerful that a single fat finger on a Saturday morning can essentially shut down Google search for the better part of an hour. (If you haven't read the story already, go here.)

This turns out to be an all-too-common failure mode for security mechanisms. If the security is powerful enough to do a good job of protecting you, it's probably powerful enough to do some real damage too. People make mistakes, and so sometimes the whole web gets marked as a purveyor of malware, and sometimes your anti-virus deletes applications like Excel.

And those are only the accidents. The more exciting cases are the ones where attackers turn the security system back on the people it's supposed to protect. My favorite from 2008 was the Maryland high school kids who figured out that they could fake up a license plate with a laser printer, drive by a speed camera, and give a speeding ticket to anyone they chose.

People have long known that locking accounts based on authentication failures can have the same sort of effect: if I don't like you, I can lock you out of your account until customer support opens on Monday morning. If I don't like customer support, I can lock out a few thousand users and sit back and enjoy the chaos.

The moral to the story: security features are just like all of the other features. If you haven't thought through what happens when they go wrong, you're probably in for a surprise. Security features sometimes get a free pass because somebody in the security group dreamed them up, and that's a recipe for trouble.

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