100-Percent Security – A Desirable Goal?

Abstract

In the summer of 2015, we learned that Chancellor Merkel’s PC had been infected by a virus. At the same time, the entire Bundestag network—including the computers belonging to all the members of parliament, was infected by a Trojan. The initial assessment by experts was that it would take 18 months to completely remove the malware from the IT infrastructure. What can be done to prevent attacks like these? Can we not expect the highly sensitive networks operating at the heart of our democratic process to be 100 percent secure? In an era of smartphones, social media, big data and the cloud, security and confidence are issues of increasing concern to IT managers. There are many technical answers to these questions, but there are other issues of a more philosophical nature about the digital world 2.0 that cannot be solved simply by bringing in more IT, more control or more laws.