Will we ever reach a point where large scale security breaches are a rarity rather than the norm. I feel like some of these recent issues should have been preventable.
Probably not. The space of potential security holes is very large. A would-be attacker only has to find one viable one, while the people defending against those would have to find them all. There are lots of tools to stop people from opening up well-known holes, but most issues are only "obvious" or "preventable" in hindsight.
Not until the major stakeholders are really serious about Internet security, to the point where they are willing to work to change the infrastructure of the Internet. The same goes for governments. Right now if you try to make data "too secure", and not give them some kind of backdoor ("when needed" as they say), they are actually fighting against you in the media, and possibly in Courts, Congress and through other means.
When the US government agrees to let Internet stakeholders make the Internet really secure, and not "secure to the point we can still break that security", then we should see some progress.
1. Every software has bugs. (right now we do not know how to prevent this at a reasonable cost)
2. Even after discovering and fixing the bug rolling it out takes
So, no, there always be breaches. The best you can hope for as the data magnitude grows perhaps a bit more effort will be on protecting it so that it doesn't shoot through the roof.
