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I just learned the sad news that Peter Neumann has passed away.
Peter Neumann shaped how a generation of security people learned to think about risk. As editor of RISKS Digest, he gave many of us coming up in the 1990s and early 2000s a steady education in the real-world consequences of computer failures. His work made the field more serious, more thoughtful, and more honest. He will be missed.
I first met Peter when we both testified at the 1998 Senate Governmental Affairs Committee meeting on Government Security where the L0pht testified. The combination of Peter and the L0pht made the hearing more powerful even if us hackers stole the spotlight.
Neumann and the L0pht made the same argument from two different directions. Neumann gave the institutional, systems-engineering view: the country was becoming dependent on brittle, interconnected systems that were never designed for security, reliability, or survivability. The L0pht gave the field evidence: here are the actual flaws, here is how attackers think, here is how cheaply and quickly these systems can fail in practice.
Neumann supplied the credibility of a long-time researcher warning that this was not just “hackers breaking into things,” but a structural failure of technology markets, procurement, engineering discipline, and risk management. The L0pht supplied the proof that the warnings were not theoretical. Together, we made the hearing unusually powerful: the academic risk community and the hacker community were telling the Senate the same thing, in different languages, before the rest of the world had fully caught up.
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