4 ms·
This was my favorite part, and a good lesson for every startup. Skip over all the overrated recent Stanford grads and Box alumni, THIS is the guy you want to hi
by dsl 11y ago
This was my favorite part, and a good lesson for every startup. Skip over all the overrated recent Stanford grads and Box alumni, THIS is the guy you want to hire:
"Only one person in the entire Department of Defense, a technical officer in a Marine unit in the Pacific, responded to the attack in an effective manner: seeing that something odd was happening with the computer server, he pulled it offline at his own initiative."
- jhayward 11y agoIf you ask me the best response was the officer who told his commander he "didn't trust his command and control". In my mind this indicates someone who is aware of the issue, and is already taking action to work around the problem - which in the military mind was not that some computers were hacked, it was that C3 mechanisms couldn't be counted on. Fortunately the military trains officers to deal with decision-making in ambigious situations and creating workarounds when taking battle damage. I'll be willing to bet the next sentence in that message was a suggestion for how he would proceed.
- fabulist 11y ago> If you ask me the best response was the officer who told his commander he "didn't trust his command and control". It was unclear to me whether or not that message was relayed faithfully to his commander, or whether it was intercepted by the red team.
- jessaustin 11y agoIt was definitely intercepted; that's why they were laughing about it.
- fabulist 11y agoSorry, whether it was intercepted & no longer relayed faithfully, versus intercepted passively.
- Afforess 11y agoAbsolutely, and bravo to the officer. If you are ever unsure, pull the plug. The safest computer is one turned off.
- theoh 11y agoI'm not sure that was implied. He could have used ifconfig. Now that you mention it, though, I thought of an apparently notorious scene from NCIS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yc-FuE41kZU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yc-FuE41kZU
- SixSigma 11y agoI'm not sure the ones in the 99 US nuclear reactors can just be pulled without incident.
- matt_wulfeck 11y agoThat part made me laugh. Thankfully their supervisor probably didn't have some obsession with uptime or that would have been tough to explain.
- jayess 11y agoHe probably got reprimanded for interrupting some general's solitaire game.
- hackuser 11y agoI generally disagree but it depends on the server. That technical officer made the attacker's DoS attack a success. Imagine if everyone responded that way to questionable activity.
- jschwartzi 11y agoIt's a risk mitigation. Questionable communications which cause changes in troop deployments may be worse than a total blackout and subsequent stasis.
- generj 11y agoAren't there some viruses which do more damage on reboot? And removing power could remove forensic information, if the virus was loaded exclusively in RAM. I think air-gapping would have been a wise move, but I would have kept the server powered and running until a post-mortem could be performed.
- varjag 11y agoThere's nothing suggesting he actually shut the server down.