Battered Customers Wait For RSA SecurID Replacements

It has long been a mystery to many sociologists on why women (it rarely is men) return to abusive relationships. Oftentimes, manipulation of the battered spouse/partner is cited as a reason. Doublespeak of course predated RSA's announcements and seems to have served many regimes well over the course of decades. Well, according to a WSJ piece, a lot of RSA SecurID customers cannot wait for their brand new security tokens to be replaced even if it means that they are at the mercy of hackers out there:

That means it could take at least six to eight months to replace all of the tokens, and at least two months to replace a third of them. The manufacturing bottleneck could be even greater given RSA tokens typically expire after three years and must be replaced.

But this demonstrates that the Laws of Inertia apply beyond the realm of physics and couch potatoes to corporate and government IT departments as well. The latest round of hacks have clearly made headlines, but preventing current and future hacks require a clean break from past best practices and require an out-of-the-box mindset. Otherwise, we will see more and more prominent hacks and one day they may be relegated to the inner pages of our daily rags just like Iraq and Afghanistan hardly make the headlines anymore.