Why You Really Shouldn’t Worry About Cyber War is a little like the movie title “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb”, but the Mencken quote is absolutely spot on for cyber security: “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” While there are Bad Guys out there who really do wish us ill, a huge chunk of what our government spends on these days has very little to do with reducing that risk, and everything to do with buying political insurance. Nobody wants to be the one who voted against some white elephant after an event where a white elephant might have saved the day, however unlikely that would be. So government buys the best white elephants it can find based on advice from the best white elephant salesmen, and tells us we must be safer as a result.
What does your barber tell you when you ask him if you need a haircut? Do you think the answer will be any different when you ask Lockheed Martin whether you need a cyber-turbo-encabulator to defend against hobgoblins?