alt Hacker NewsI feel like that car security situation also is sort of setup to tell us about how folks with a security mindset can go overboard?
Some car dealership who never had a car stolen hires a consultant and they identify this pickup situation as a problem. Then they implement some wild security and now customers who just dropped off their car, just talked to the same customer service person about the weather ... have to go through some extra security to impersonally prove who they are, because someone imagined a problem that has never occurred (or nearly never). But here we go doing the security dance because someone imagined a problem that really has nothing to do with how people actually steal cars...
Computers and the internet are different of course, the volume of possibilities / bad actors you could be exposed to are seemingly endless. Yet even there security mindset can go overboard.
I'm currently trying to recover/move some developer accounts for some services because we had someone leave the company less than gracefully. Often I have my own account, it's part of an organization ... but moving ownership is an arduous and bizarrely different process for each company. I get it, you wouldn't want someone to take over our no name organization, but the process all seem to involve extra steps piled on "for security". The fact that I'm already a customer, have an account in good standing, part of the organization, the organization account holder has been inactive ... doesn't seem to matter at all, I may as well be a stranger from the outside, presumably because of "security".
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And then some person realizes that government ids can be faked, so they set up a system of doing a retinal scan of the person dropping off the car and then comparing it to the retinal scan of the person picking it up.
Then they realize that one person may be bribed so they require at least two people to verify at pickup and drop off.
Meanwhile, a car has never ever been stolen this way.
It certainly feels that way here in 2026. It seems like I'm spending so much time "verifying" and "authenticating" and clicking somewhere so that the service can send me a code in E-mail. And more and more services are getting super aggressive. Biometrics, 2FA, uploading government ID, uploading face scans... Good grief!
I can imagine being in info-sec is a rough life. When you get breached, they're blamed. So they spend all their time red-teaming and coming up with outlandish ways that their systems can be compromised, and equally outlandish hoops for users to jump through just to use their product. So the product gets all these hoops. And then an attacker gets even more creative, breaches you again, and now your product has horrible UX + you're still getting breached.