6 Quotes To Make You Rethink Fraud, Cybercrime, and The Future of Security

From philosophers and satirists, economists and executives, come words of wisdom to reshape your thinking on what fraud is, why it must be understood, and how it can be stopped.

A great quote can jolt you out of intellectual lethargy and open your eyes to new possibilities. It can alter your perspective, open up new avenues of thought, and point you in different directions.

To experience this sort of imposed paradigm shift is healthy — it’s good to rethink things every once in a while. In a fast-evolving field like fraud, one mustn’t get locked into fixed ways of addressing problems. Reactive, legacy solutions are the bane of modern fraud prevention’s existence, and they represent a failure to adapt and evolve at acceptable speeds.

In the spirit of keeping our thinking fresh, here is a selection of six quotes that will hopefully destabilize your mindset just enough that you find yourself looking at fraud from an altogether new angle.

“Any informed borrower is simply less vulnerable to fraud and abuse.”
— Alan Greenspan, former Chair of the Federal Reserve of the United States

This is a lesson to us all to remember that, no matter how good fraud prevention solutions may be, there is still no substitute for personal responsibility and knowledge. This advice applies all the way from the individual to the largest multinational corporation. It is simply not true that what you don’t know can’t hurt you; rather, as Mr. Greenspan succinctly points out, the opposite is in fact the case — what we don’t know is exactly what can hurt us.

“Force and fraud are, in war, the two cardinal virtues.”
— Thomas Hobbes, Philosopher

War metaphors are uncomfortably common in our modern times — the War on Drugs, the War on Terrorism, the Trade War — and they’re certainly omnipresent in “fraud-speak.” However, they’re often inappropriately applied (should a customer really be referred to as a “target?”), and sometimes even serve to veil otherwise nuanced subjects (what exactly IS a “War on Fraud?”). In the case of this quote from Thomas Hobbes, however, there is indeed something important to be learned. Those of us on the right side of the law cannot break the law in order to “win.” So, fraud is not an option for us. Thus, we are left with force. We need to be bigger, stronger, faster, and more powerful. Only in this way can we “defeat” modern fraud.

“There is a simple rule here, a rule of legislation, a rule of business, a rule of life: beyond a certain point, complexity is fraud. You can apply that rule to left-wing social programs, but you can also apply that rule to credit derivatives, hedge funds, all the rest of it.”
— P.J. O’ Rourke, Research Fellow, Satirist, Journalist

O’ Rourke’s quote here can rightly be described as cynical, but it contains within it a vital truth: with complexity, comes fraud.

“Most people are starting to realize that there are only two different types of companies in the world: those that have been breached and know it and those that have been breached and don’t know it.”

Variations of this quote have been attributed to a wide array of voices, including Ted Schlein, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (who is credited with the above iteration), Dmitri Alperovitch, CTO of Crowdstrike, and John Chambers, former CEO of Cisco. Regardless of the attribution, it’s a sobering observation. That said, it’s also an exhortation of a kind, to put our focus on addressing what happens to the data after it’s been stolen. In doing so, we can still prevent a breach from actually causing downstream damage.

“Torture the data, and it will confess to everything.”
— Ronald Coase

Ronald Coase won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1991, and this penetrating and vivid quote makes clear the force of his intellect. Much as we want to believe in the objectivity of data, we can’t.

It was a tough choice to determine which quote should conclude this post. This one, from the CEO of IBM, seemed sweeping enough for the job:

“Cybercrime is the greatest threat to every company in the world.”
— Ginni Rometty

If that doesn’t get your thinking, we don’t know what will!