Keep Things Exceptional
Thursday, April 20th, 2006 | Nick Bugajski
A recent story about a driver circumventing the traffic lights on his way to work reminds us that security does not work without monitoring. Exceptional events should be rare, which means it should be reasonable to keep track of when they occur.
In this instance the problem was solved when people noted that the same car seemed to be around when the traffic lights were behaving abnormally. There is no reason that this could have been noticed sooner by an automated feedback system. With a proper automated system, it should be simple to note the rise in occurrence of these exception events (he was going to work every day!) and notify a person who can decide if it is meaningful/worth further investigation. Even if this person were to decide it is not, the system could notify them again later when it becomes apparent that the events are occurring at regular intervals. And even if that is dismissed, then the logging of events at least allows a person somewhere to go for investigation should they note the abnormal behavior independently of the system, as was the case in this situation.
Hopefully such feedback is part of the upgrade they mentioned will be implemented. More security does not really seem necessary, just better feedback.
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