Solar Winds, defence and the meaning of life

[Boac]

Placed here rather than in the idle waters of 'Computing' since the implications are far-reaching.

https://www.theregister.com/2020/12/15/ ... ds_update/

It would appear that Russian hackers may have breached the system the military and national authorities use to prevent breaches of security in 'the military and national authorities'. The hack may have been around since spring, although possibly not downloaded that far back by the 18,000 'customers'. Both UK and US are said to be badly affected.

Good 'ere, innit?

[TheGreenGoblin]

It appears to have been a very serious breach of security and it will take months, if not years, to ascertain how much damage has been done. Not a word from the moribund Trump administration on this subject.

My business uses Microsoft Office 365 and Azure Virtual servers which were also breached in this attack, although if the Russians want access to our Gigabytes of un-attributable actuarial tables then they are more boring than the tables themselves!

[boing]

I was actually going to post on this very subject under the broader title of "Chaos in the World". Committing all of our "secrets" to a totally insecure communications method is insanity, we have gleefully adopted a system that was never designed with security in mind and we use it to carry out state business, control our power distribution system, run our businesses, support our national defences, support our medical services, etc etc etc. The best result of this short sightedness may be that all countries are afraid to go to war because they are totally uncertain about how their command and control systems may, or may not, work!

On the larger scale though consider we are almost deliberately, joyfully, setting ourselves up for failure on many levels because we have cheerfully accepted that whatever comes with new technology must be better. Who the hell needs are refrigerator that can be reprogrammed from a cocktail party? What mentality thinks it's OK to flip their television over to the baby monitor view periodically rather than take a break from a DVD when the child is only 20 feet away? The world is going mad. Because I am known to be somewhat of a handyman I got a phone call the other day "My heating systems not working. The control screen has gone blank and none of the buttons work. Do you have any ideas?". Question "Did you change the batteries?. "Batteries, does it use batteries, I thought it used electricity".

I'm a curmudgeonly grump but I can't help asking when somebody comes to me raving about all of the advanced features of something like the F35 "How does it work with all that junk turned off?".

.

[Boac]

........and the Chump is worried about Huawei. The ex-president elect certainly has his finger on something, and it ain't the pulse.

Chump - be gone

[Bob]

Remember reading Firewall by Andy McNab what must be nearly 20 years ago and thinking...yea it would be really bad if Governments started connecting all the infrastructure to the internet, but they aren't that dumb
...Oh dear

[TheGreenGoblin]

A

former FBI deputy has alleged that President Trump has been diverting money from cybersecurity resources to build a wall at a time when the “nation is under attack”.

Speaking to MSNBC on Thursday about a report published in Politico that revealed that hackers accessed systems at the National Nuclear Security Administration, Frank Figliuzzi, a former FBI deputy director for counterintelligence, said that the reason such attacks are occurring is that the budget for cybersecurity under the Trump administration had been squeezed in order to prioritise other things.

“Make no mistake, our nation is under attack and it appears to be ongoing,” said Mr Figliuzzi. “How does something like this happen of this magnitude? Where 300,000 clients of a private company are potentially impacted including the most sensitive agencies in our government, it is because the Russias were able to find a single point of failure in our supply chain.”

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/worl ... 76007.html