Slashdot had an interesting thread on creative responses to security threats. While the article itself was about wireless networking, the conversation that followed was very thought provoking (perhaps even inspiring).

The problem was that people were having others try to piggy-back over their private wireless network. The solutions, ranged from scary to annoying to hilarious. Instead of taking the enterprise route (find a vendor, spend some money, integrate the system) it is interesting to see what a web hacker would do in the same situation.

The solution I liked the most was very subtle:

1. Figure out who was an unauthorized user.
2. Analyze their web traffic and figure out what images are being requested.
3. Modify the incoming images so that they are blurry or inverted.
4. Watch them pull their hair out when they think that their graphics driver is corrupted or their hardware is broken.

This is a great response, and one that a lot of “professionals” wouldn’t even consider. This is mostly because the way we deal with threats is to take a lot of time and effort and spend a lot of money to ensure that nothing bad ever happens. Instead, the hacker approach just makes it very annoying for someone to do something they shouldn’t be doing anyway.

This just goes to show that addressing architecture issues by focusing on the people issues takes less time, less money, less effort, and is a lot more fun. Is there anything in your information architecture that could benefit from a more people-centered focus?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 15th, 2006 at 5:03 am and is filed under Information Architecture, Systems Integration, People, Practices. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.