Apple security chief calls for vulnerability tax

Apple’s new security chief, David Rice, has some interesting views on how to improve software security – in particular a vulnerability tax concept.

The soon-to-be global security head believes such a tax could be handled in the same way as pollution, making companies pay for the amount of environmental damage they caused.

“We run cars in various crash tests to see how they respond, we can run these attack patterns on software, judge how it performs and give it a security rating,” Rice told Forbes this week. “If a tax raised the private cost of cybercrime, people would get educated very quickly. When insecure software starts costing more, people will adjust their behaviour.”