Wednesday, November 3, 2010  Security Costs vs Benefits: Should
companies deploy SSL to deal with Firesheep?  Yesterday, I
talked about why end-users don't care about security and how
that actually makes a certain amount of sense for them since the
cost of behaving more securely can overwhelm the cost of an
actual breach.  However, what I didn't talk about is whether
this is true for companies. A single security breach in a single
user account maybe doesn't cost a company much, but if breaches
get common enough that they start losing users, it could be a
problem with a much higher cost.  While users trying to protect
themselves from curious folk with firesheep are counseled to use
a VPN, website owners can choose to do encryption right from
their end using SSL. But it was thought that SSL was
computationally costly and even environmentally costly due to
the supposed need for extra electricity and machines.  But who's
been looking at what those costs actually are? A blog post
entitled Overclocking SSL looked a