Forbes.com posted a fascinating interview with Gary McGraw, chief technology officer at Cigital and author of Exploiting Online Games: Cheating Massively Distributed Systems, wherein McGraw discusses how companies and security firms can learn from activity in digitally distributed games. The interview is full of interesting points that link virtual activities to real life issues and consequences, for instance:
From a sociological perspective, you probably have to have some cheating in a game because there are a lot of people who want to play the game but they don’t want to “live” the game. So you need some level of corruption and graft in the system to satisfy those people. The real question is, how much of that is necessary? Clearly if you look at the real world there is crime, corruption and graft and that keeps the skids greased. We could wipe out all crime, but the world would be a police state.
The real answer is not to eradicate all cheating and adopt all sorts of Draconian software security but to do just the right amount so that everybody is not cheating. It’s a balance. Security will become a differentiator in the marketplace that it isn’t now.
Head over to Forbes.com for the full interview.
