A fatal flaw of any book on software, therefore, is the lack of deference to the wild array of software in the world. The software in your car is different than in your home computer, is different than the software in space shuttles, is different than software in airplanes, is different than software in medical devices, and so on. As such, one can argue that the quality of software will differ by its intended use. Software in websites will have different and probably lower quality than software in airplanes. And this is true. There is only one problem with this reasoning: Hackers could care less about these distinctions.

At the point when software is injected into a product and that product is made available to the consumer (or in any other way allows the attacker to touch or interact with the software), it is fair game for exploitation. This includes automobiles, mobile phones, video game consoles, and even nuclear reactors. Once the software is connected to a network, particularly the Internet, the software is nothing more than a target. As a case in point, two men were charged with hacking into the Los Angeles city traffic center to turn off traffic lights at four intersections in August 2006. It took four days to return the city's traffic control system to normal operation as the hackers locked out others from the system.¹⁴ Given that more and more products are becoming "network aware;" that is, they are connected to and can communicate across a digital network, software of any kind regardless of its intended use is fair game in the eyes of an attacker. As William Cheswick and Steven Bellovin noted in Firewalls and Internet Security, "Any program no matter how innocuous it seems can harbor security holes...We have a firm belief that everything is guilty until proven innocent."

This is not paranoia on the part of the authors; this is the reality.

Therefore, I have chosen to distinguish primarily between two types of software: software that is networked, such as the software on your home computer or mobile phone, and software that is not. The software controlling a car's transmission is not networked; that is, it is not connected to the Internet, at least not yet. Though not connected to the Internet, weaknesses in this software can still potentially harm the occupants as I illuminate in Chapter 2. But it is only a matter of time before the software in your transmission, as with most all other devices, will be connected to a global network. Once connection occurs the nature of the game changes and so too does the impact of even the tiniest mistake in software production. That software has different intended uses by the manufacturers is no excuse for failing to prepare it for an actively and proven hostile environment, as Chapter 3, "The Power of Weaknesses," highlights.

Finally, the radical malleability of software has moved me to group multiple aspects of insufficient software manufacturing practices such as software defects, errors, faults, and vulnerabilities under the rubric of "software weaknesses." This might appear at first as overly simplistic, but for this type of discussion, it is arguably sufficient for the task at hand.

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Published with permission of Pearson Education from the book Geekonomics by David Rice.