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> TalkTalk said it would only let customers leave without penalty in the “unlikely event that money is stolen from a customer’s bank account as a direct result
by Zikes 11y ago
> TalkTalk said it would only let customers leave without penalty in the “unlikely event that money is stolen from a customer’s bank account as a direct result of the cyber-attack”.
Man, I would hate to get stuck with the carrier that got breached for "bank details and personal information of its four million customers" by a 15 year old kid. That sort of lack of security should in and of itself constitute a severe breach of customer trust and confidence.
- vegabook 11y agoNot sure that 15-year-old kids are any less competent at hacking than adults. What they may lack in experience, they compensate for with a fresh, original mind, and nothing-to-lose. We've seen this picture many times before. I'd suggest that TalkTalk would be less competent if the hacker had been a greybeard rather than a kid, because greybeard's IT stack and MO is entrenched, conventional, and defendable-against, unlike Kiddo over here whose mind will skateboard around the pros leaving them standing.
- radicalbyte 11y agoGoing by Kreb's analysis of the attack [1] it would appear that the breach was a run-of-the-mill SQL Injection attack. Proper security 1-0-1 stuff. [1] http://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/10/talktalk-hackers-demanded-80k-in-bitcoin/ http://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/10/talktalk-hackers-demanded...
- vegabook 11y agofair enough, though I think the idea that 15-year-olds are somehow to be dismissed as greenhorns is incorrect. We surely have a disproportionate distribution skewed towards the young among the hackerati, even if we take into account the fact that 50+ age groups didn't have computers in their childhood.
- radicalbyte 11y agoI totally agree. The stuff I myself was doing at 15 was more sophisticated than the "security consultants" I talk to professionally even consider. At that age you have intelligence, lack of considering consequences and importantly lots of time. That's a dangerous combination.
- criley2 11y agoWhen you combine the potential lack of punishment for juveniles with the biological reality that prefrontal cortex development in adult humans doesn't really complete until the mid twenties, you get teenagers who don't think bad outcomes are possible, and whose brain is less capable of long term risk assessment. I would think that the 50+ crowd would be far more hampered by their risk assessment of the negative outcomes of these behaviors than by their skillsets alone. A teen is in it for the lulz, or the glory, or whatever, but a greybeard could lose his retirement, leave his spouse high and dry, lose his ability to see and support his family...
- vegabook 11y agoSo they're less risk averse even if they're less competent. Probably right. Though I think there's also something intellectually liberating about having no risk constraints, which might allow for attack vectors that are unconventional.
- niels_olson 11y agoWhat you should be really afraid of is 50 year olds without risk aversion. Like the decision-makers at banks, politicians who will never personally go to war or the welfare line, etc.
- monksy 11y agoYou would be suprised... There are startups out there who say "we don't care about an attack we're too small... we're going to write all of our sql by hand."
- 0942v8653 11y agoJust because they "write all of [their] sql by hand" doesn't mean they will be vulnerable to an attack as simple as this. This is just pure and unmitigated incompetence.
- tsotha 11y agoYes. Preventing SQL injection attacks is very, very easy. To have something like that in your code in 2015 is inexcusable.
- radicalbyte 11y agoIt's not just startups. The stuff I've seen at some very large companies would make you cringe. As a colleague developer of mine says: I don't want any of my personal information on the internet because I know how developers think. Sigh.
- louthy 11y ago> they compensate for with a fresh, original mind, and nothing-to-lose And time.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- knodi123 11y agobut mostly a false sense of invulnerability. Man, when I think back to the stupid things I did on the internet as a teenager that simply earned me a glare or a stern warning email.... I'm so glad I was a teenager in the 90s, because if I'd done that shit today, I'd be in jail.
- SixSigma 11y ago> because greybeard's IT stack and MO is entrenched, conventional, and defendable-against this is utterly ridiculous
- vegabook 11y agoWhat is ridiculous about it? I have been coding for 30 years and am happy to pronounce that younger coders have a far more nimble mind than me. I'll destroy them on complex software engineering but I'm constantly impressed by their innovations. Anybody who finds this "ridiculous" is either a rare evergreen genius, or more likely, self-satisfyingly complacent.
- vezzy-fnord 11y agoI'm quite young and I'm curious about those "innovations" myself.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- SixSigma 11y agoSo you're still writing code in Delphi or maybe Zortech C++ ?
- vegabook 11y agotry Reddit. Your (zero insight) posts are not constructive here.
- mod 11y agoI think his point was you don't to be "entrenched" in an old stack. How "nimble" your mind is really isn't important, and surely you don't think that a 15 year old can be more competent than you in a given stack. It's just that you're not exposing yourself to the new stacks.
- 11y ago
- brianmcc 11y ago15 year olds also have a hell of a lot of time to invest in whatever takes their fancy. Never underestimate the single minded focus of an inquisitive teenager!