"I was reading through an article last night about the 25 greatest blunders in technology history and was happily strolling through memory lane (what are Palm Pilots, PS/2s and Apple Newtons anyways? :p) and then got quite a surprise at the very end of the article.  The number one technology failure of all time according to the article’s author (Neil McAllister) is … security!

First off, Neil is right. From a technology standpoint, security has failed. Neil argues that technology was built on top of an already insecure foundation, and so the result of anything on top of that foundation will be anything but secure. However, I would like to present some additional reasons why security may be the biggest wet blanket of all time. Read on.

In my opinion security is not a single “thing”.  Security has to do with much more than exploited vulnerabilities, hackers, and missing patches. This beast we call security actually has three heads.  They are:

• People
• Process
• Technology

It’s when all three of these work together is when security is most effective. Unfortunately, neither of these three have been playing well together lately, if ever.  Neil did a great job covering the technology piece already, so I’ll talk about the other two. Also, each one of these aspects of security is a long discussion in itself so I am just going to share what I think is the top failure in each of the two remaining categories and would love to hear your thoughts too."

Read more: http://blog.impactalabs.com/2009/01/03/security-the-number-one-technology-failure-of-all-time/