10 ms·

I posted this same suspicion yesterday. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14646881 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14646881) Russia is "range testing"

I posted this same suspicion yesterday. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14646881 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14646881) Russia is "range testing" its weapons in Ukraine. The West and particularly the US should be very worried about this. The sanctions against Russia are dictating its policy and they have shown a willingness to escalate beyond what's been considered "appropriate" in the past. I'll say it again here, a country will be made to surrender its policy due to crippling cyber-attacks. As has been shown in the past a western country will only fight a war as long as the citizens support it. When people are harmed and dying due to hospital shut downs, inaccessible banks, power companies offline, airplanes grounded and food shipping stalled - politicians will feel their arms have been twisted horribly but will concede. How well would Washington, DC function for weeks or longer without electrical power? What Russia is preparing for is the equivalent of bombing cities until surrender (not the direct death, but the punish the population to cause surrender method). As far as I know, there are no international laws around it. Best case is all sides escalate cyber-weapon "strength" to unthinkable levels and we enter a new cold-war standoff. But again, the nuke mutually assured destruction only could happen after nukes had been proven to be crippling... The West needs to take this threat very seriously, or we'll soon find ourselves at the wrong end of the barrel of a new weapon.

sqeaky 9y ago
This seems alarmist to me. In principle we can make computers much more secure and in practice some groups actually do. If we get some decent information out there and stop enabling people with the mentality that computer security is an add-on product I think we can make it pretty far. I doubt google or microsoft will be significantly harmed by a "cyber-weapon", and I don't think most end-user devices with automatic updates enabled will either. This is a solvable problem.
- amelius 9y ago
  > This is a solvable problem. If only security wasn't last on the budget ...
- GilbertErik 9y ago
  It's not about harming Google or Microsoft. It's about attacking vulnerabilities in infrastructure. No one cares if your webapp that's instantly reporting on the current length of a celebrity's hair is still capable of serving traffic if traffic lights have been disabled or if your ISP has been knocked completely off line or if the cellular network has been severely crippled.
- BoiledCabbage 9y ago
  > In principle we can make computers much more secure and in practice some groups actually do. In principle we could, and yet in the 20-30 years of common interconnected computers we haven't. > If we get some decent information out there and stop enabling people with the mentality that computer security is an add-on product This isn't just about getting "information" out, and if it were only information people would've fixed it decades ago. The problem is that there are no incentives. The cost of making products actually secure, dwarfs the cost of getting a product out that makes money. The cost of being found out with a massive security breach pales in comparison to the amount of money to be made on being first to market, or having dominant share. > I doubt google or microsoft will be significantly harmed by a "cyber-weapon", and I don't think most end-user devices with automatic updates enabled will either. Linux based Android and Microsoft Windows are currently full of holes and have been exploited now for years. And this is happening by small groups of people who do it for a few dollars or to spy on a company - none of them have the full backing and resources of a nation state. To think that this problem will suddenly be solved by doing more of the same "educating people" to me comes across as a bit naive. It hasn't worked this long, it won't suddenly work now. Incentives need to change. Punishment for a security hole needs to increase significantly, entirely new tooling needs to be enforced or some other solution needs to be created. This is one of those cases where the solution is seen as so drastic that people will want to just ignore or dismiss it. Thinking to themselves, no-one can really be advocating for that it'd impact everything. It will - making our digital systems secure will be hugely expensive. I see a Y2K x 10 style concerted effort as the only way to get things to change - but hopefully someone out there has an idea more likely to be implemented.
- tw04 9y ago
  I don't think you understand... there's literally 0 chance that hospitals and power plants are going to just universally enable windows update on their critical systems. Any patch that gets applied to life or death systems has to go through significant regression testing before going live. I guess you could suggest they just get universally redundant systems and take rolling outages, but I'm guessing nobody would be willing to pay for the cost of implementing such a scheme.
  - sqeaky 9y ago
    Perhaps there should be a 0% chance that those things are on networks and a 0% chance they run a normal consumer grade OS. If the software in power plants were treated like their hardware it wouldn't be a problem.
    - rbanffy 9y ago
      A custom OS would have an attack surface larger than one widely used. For high value targets, it'd be easier to attack.
      - sqeaky 9y ago
        A minimalistic OS intended for high security ought to be much smaller and should lack almost everything a general purposed OS has. This should make the attack surface pretty minimal. If that OS gets reused by many people so it gets vetted by time I think that would be best. Perhaps a very stripped down Linux or BSD could fill the role. There is absolutely no reason to have things network configuration wizards, wobbly windows or other fluff. I think there are already systems and tools to help someone construct a custom minimal Linux OS (Yocto) and perhaps people already use these to construct appliances for highly sensitive systems. I don't think we are that far away, at least some industries are pretty well covered already.
        tw04 9y ago
        The exploits in question haven't been from "network configuration wizards" or "wobbly windows" - they're literally from backwards compatibility. And medical devices are one of the EXACT reasons there's so much cruft in Windows. They rely on ancient code becaues getting things re-approved via the FDA can take YEARS and millions of dollars. Those manufacturers won't change unless they have a gun to their head. So what... we switch to a stripped down version of Linux that won't ever have the kernel updated and will need to continue supporting version 1.0 of samba because of some arbitrary codepath to load new versions of firmware. It's easy to sit back and cast judgement when you don't deal with that industry... but they aren't doing it this way because it's fun.
- shallot_router 9y ago
  When you're up against a hostile organized adversary, especially a superpower nation-state's government and intelligence agencies, it's very very hard to just rely on better training and education and secure development practices. Everyone still needs to be doing these things, but the fight here is very asymmetric. If NSA or FSB or equivalent decides they want to disrupt or damage your company in a cyberattack, it's going to happen.
SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
There are lots of reasons to not (fully) trust the NSA (and related agencies). They've done (and likely still do) some things I don't approve of -- I think most of us could write a lengthy post about the details. At the same time though, we need to collaborate with things like the Information Assurance Directorate (IAD)[0] to secure national systems. There are dangerous weaknesses in the US computer systems, and while a lot of the research on securing systems is done by private groups, government agencies are really the only ones that can sustain the funding and act as coordinators between private and public interests (eg, it's costly to secure the electrical grid, but there's a public interest in having one secure against attack). So hopefully the past few years have scared the NSA on to a saner course of supporting national defense instead of undermining it. And hopefully we can meaningfully collaborate with them on defense while fighting them on issues of privacy. [0] - https://www.iad.gov/iad/index.cfm https://www.iad.gov/iad/index.cfm
daxorid 9y ago
Again with the evidence-free Russian attribution hypothesis.
- notadoc 9y ago
  Regardless of attribution, do you not find it worrying?
  - jpttsn 9y ago
    Attribution would appear central. I'd find it worrying if Voldemort was behind this, but I don't see how I could be worried about that possibility without attribution.
    - notadoc 9y ago
      Interesting approach. If you had a disease, would you not be worried until you figured out what specifically caused your disease?
      - jpttsn 9y ago
        Sure would. But if you told me chemtrails was behind it, I might ask you to show your working before focusing my worries on that.
- rbanffy 9y ago
  It seems to be a good match for the observed events.
  - pabloski 9y ago
    What events? The fact that Russia is the second most targeted country? Come on, this is the same old and tiring fake news from the "famous" hungarian oligarch's mass media. Even CNN has admitted to have produced fake news on Russia and Trump http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread1176663/pg1 http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread1176663/pg1 Seriously, this bullshit about the russian is starting to become irritating. My dog died yesterday. I am sure, it was Putin who did it!
notadoc 9y ago
> The West needs to take this threat very seriously, or we'll soon find ourselves at the wrong end of the barrel of a new weapon. I agree with your assessment. But with US politics as they are, it is hard to imagine anything being taken seriously.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
knz 9y ago
> The West needs to take this threat very seriously, or we'll soon find ourselves at the wrong end of the barrel of a new weapon. Our geopolitical opponents should be cautious as well - Public knowledge of weapons technology is often decades behind the reality and I doubt the US and it's allies are unable to defend and respond to any large scale attack.
- throwanem 9y ago
  I doubt anyone failed to draw the intended meaning from the government messaging around Stuxnet.
fnovd 9y ago
I'm surprised to see even people on this site downplaying how worrisome these attacks are. The ability to shut down an enemy's computer systems remotely is an awesome power, and will only become more impactful as we rely more and more on computer systems in our everyday lives. Forget space: the internet is the next frontier. A group of enemy soldiers shutting down a hospital would be met with outrage and military backlash. A group of hackers shutting down fifty hospitals is met with jokes about outdated operating systems and derision towards IT directors. At what point do we stop treating these like annoyances of a strange new world and start treating them like what they are: targeted, military-grade attacks. The whole world can see how woefully unprepared the West is for attacks of this nature and the attackers are only going to grow more bold. The more intertwined tech is with the military, the more powerful the cyber-warfare paradigm becomes.
- Mizza 9y ago
  A thing you two aren't considering is the that US and the UK are the world leaders on the offensive side of this same technology, "we" just do a (slightly) better job of keeping this stuff contained. Raytheon, BAE, etc. all have cyber weapons development divisions and obviously GCHQ and NSA do their own internal development. The west's policy of "proportional response" will apply to cyber attacks as well. Not that this is an excuse for having unpatched systems or not designing for the catastrophe scenario, but we should remember that this is a two-way street.
  - fnovd 9y ago
    >A thing you two aren't considering is the that US and the UK are the world leaders on the offensive side of this same technology Exactly, on the offensive side. I'm not particularly concerned about our ability to retaliate proportionally. But what good is a deterrent if it fails to deter attackers? Our defensive capabilities are clearly lacking, as these past few attacks have shown.
- Ajedi32 9y ago
  > A group of enemy soldiers shutting down a hospital would be met with outrage and military backlash. A group of hackers shutting down fifty hospitals is met with jokes about outdated operating systems and derision towards IT directors. The problem with this analogy is that, while an attack by a group of enemy soldiers is easily attributable to a specific nation, cyberattacks can be carried out by pretty much anyone; and it's not easy to say with confidence that a specific government organization orchestrated the attack. I'd be more inclined to compare this to a terrorist attack at an airport carried out by someone who managed to get a homemade bomb past security by simply slipping by while no one was looking. Outrageous, sure, but not necessarily easy to attribute to a specific nation, and probably preventable had security measures not been wholly inadequate.
pdkl95 9y ago
> Russia Accusations without evidence are irresponsible; incorrect attribution erodes trust and justifies resentment that lasts far longer than the current situation. The article discusses evidence suggesting that Ukraine was the target, but that's only circumstantially suggests that Russia may be responsible. Proper attribution of anything on the internet is already incredibly difficult. The history of false flags and other deception-based motives makes the problem even harder. > Best case is all sides escalate cyber-weapon "strength" to unthinkable levels and we enter a new cold-war standoff. No, the best case is for software authors to be held liable for the safety problems in the infrastructure they create. MAD isn't going to stop other parties - even script kiddies - from exploiting the same bugs. Yes, it will cost a lot of time and money, but we've known how to build secure systems for a long time[1]. Escalating another conflict between the two largest nuclear powers is a plan that has a very good chance of getting a lot of people killed. From the article: >> The Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: “[The attack] again proves the Russian thesis that such a threat requires cooperation on the global level.” I have a lot of issues with the current administration of Russia, but this is how we will survive the brave new technological world. MAD relies on the fear of retaliation; a far more reliable method of deterring hostilities is to create the situation where each side no longer wants a conflict, which can be accomplished with economic interdependencies. You don't bomb - conventionally, atomically, or with a weaponized computer virus - the business partners you rely on. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Computer_System_Evaluation_Criteria#A_.E2.80.94_Verified_protection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Computer_System_Evalua...
- anthonybsd 9y ago
  > The history of false flags Ukraine has a history of false flags? Do tell.
  - pabloski 9y ago
    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/ukraine/1359353/Ukraine-admits-it-shot-down-Russian-airliner.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/ukraine/135...
pizza 9y ago
We should be concerned with evidence, cold hard truth, before premature escalation.
iammyIP 9y ago
You should stop posting your useless suspicions everywhere.
- dang 9y ago
  Please don't do this here, even if another comment seems useless or wrong. Instead, if you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; otherwise please don't comment until you do.
  - iammyIP 9y ago
    Ok, agreed.
mtgx 9y ago
You would think that in such dire times, the Five Eyes would want adopt a stronger policy towards security and less towards leaving every PC and smartphone vulnerable to attacks to make surveillance easier. Instead, they're now getting ready to discuss how to backdoor devices and encryption at the upcoming Five Eyes and G20 meetings.
chocolatebunny 9y ago
Citizens are more likely to support a war if the affects are felt at home. Every child that dies in a hospital that is under attack will be a rallying cry for the masses.
belorn 9y ago
Maybe this was retaliation for Wannacry which exploit (EternalBlue) was developed by the west and causing havoc through a ransomware. It would follow a tit-for-tat escalation strategy in cold-war style. The NSA did not intended to have wannacry but I can easily see if an other nation do not care about the distinction. International laws would be nice. Few'er hospitals would be crippled by tax supported malware development. Focus could be spent on improving security and patching fault rather than hording and exploiting.
wu-ikkyu 9y ago
East vs West, Cold War, Politicians, "Cyber". Does anyone else find it foreboding that attacks like these are still being primarily framed within the terminology of a legacy 50+ year old threat model? "World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation." -Marshall McLuhan (1970)

sqeaky 9y ago

This seems alarmist to me. In principle we can make computers much more secure and in practice some groups actually do. If we get some decent information out there and stop enabling people with the mentality that computer security is an add-on product I think we can make it pretty far. I doubt google or microsoft will be significantly harmed by a "cyber-weapon", and I don't think most end-user devices with automatic updates enabled will either. This is a solvable problem.

amelius 9y ago
> This is a solvable problem. If only security wasn't last on the budget ...
GilbertErik 9y ago
It's not about harming Google or Microsoft. It's about attacking vulnerabilities in infrastructure. No one cares if your webapp that's instantly reporting on the current length of a celebrity's hair is still capable of serving traffic if traffic lights have been disabled or if your ISP has been knocked completely off line or if the cellular network has been severely crippled.
BoiledCabbage 9y ago
> In principle we can make computers much more secure and in practice some groups actually do. In principle we could, and yet in the 20-30 years of common interconnected computers we haven't. > If we get some decent information out there and stop enabling people with the mentality that computer security is an add-on product This isn't just about getting "information" out, and if it were only information people would've fixed it decades ago. The problem is that there are no incentives. The cost of making products actually secure, dwarfs the cost of getting a product out that makes money. The cost of being found out with a massive security breach pales in comparison to the amount of money to be made on being first to market, or having dominant share. > I doubt google or microsoft will be significantly harmed by a "cyber-weapon", and I don't think most end-user devices with automatic updates enabled will either. Linux based Android and Microsoft Windows are currently full of holes and have been exploited now for years. And this is happening by small groups of people who do it for a few dollars or to spy on a company - none of them have the full backing and resources of a nation state. To think that this problem will suddenly be solved by doing more of the same "educating people" to me comes across as a bit naive. It hasn't worked this long, it won't suddenly work now. Incentives need to change. Punishment for a security hole needs to increase significantly, entirely new tooling needs to be enforced or some other solution needs to be created. This is one of those cases where the solution is seen as so drastic that people will want to just ignore or dismiss it. Thinking to themselves, no-one can really be advocating for that it'd impact everything. It will - making our digital systems secure will be hugely expensive. I see a Y2K x 10 style concerted effort as the only way to get things to change - but hopefully someone out there has an idea more likely to be implemented.
tw04 9y ago
I don't think you understand... there's literally 0 chance that hospitals and power plants are going to just universally enable windows update on their critical systems. Any patch that gets applied to life or death systems has to go through significant regression testing before going live. I guess you could suggest they just get universally redundant systems and take rolling outages, but I'm guessing nobody would be willing to pay for the cost of implementing such a scheme.
- sqeaky 9y ago
  Perhaps there should be a 0% chance that those things are on networks and a 0% chance they run a normal consumer grade OS. If the software in power plants were treated like their hardware it wouldn't be a problem.
  - rbanffy 9y ago
    A custom OS would have an attack surface larger than one widely used. For high value targets, it'd be easier to attack.
    - sqeaky 9y ago
      A minimalistic OS intended for high security ought to be much smaller and should lack almost everything a general purposed OS has. This should make the attack surface pretty minimal. If that OS gets reused by many people so it gets vetted by time I think that would be best. Perhaps a very stripped down Linux or BSD could fill the role. There is absolutely no reason to have things network configuration wizards, wobbly windows or other fluff. I think there are already systems and tools to help someone construct a custom minimal Linux OS (Yocto) and perhaps people already use these to construct appliances for highly sensitive systems. I don't think we are that far away, at least some industries are pretty well covered already.
      - tw04 9y ago
        The exploits in question haven't been from "network configuration wizards" or "wobbly windows" - they're literally from backwards compatibility. And medical devices are one of the EXACT reasons there's so much cruft in Windows. They rely on ancient code becaues getting things re-approved via the FDA can take YEARS and millions of dollars. Those manufacturers won't change unless they have a gun to their head. So what... we switch to a stripped down version of Linux that won't ever have the kernel updated and will need to continue supporting version 1.0 of samba because of some arbitrary codepath to load new versions of firmware. It's easy to sit back and cast judgement when you don't deal with that industry... but they aren't doing it this way because it's fun.
shallot_router 9y ago
When you're up against a hostile organized adversary, especially a superpower nation-state's government and intelligence agencies, it's very very hard to just rely on better training and education and secure development practices. Everyone still needs to be doing these things, but the fight here is very asymmetric. If NSA or FSB or equivalent decides they want to disrupt or damage your company in a cyberattack, it's going to happen.

SomeStupidPoint 9y ago

There are lots of reasons to not (fully) trust the NSA (and related agencies). They've done (and likely still do) some things I don't approve of -- I think most of us could write a lengthy post about the details. At the same time though, we need to collaborate with things like the Information Assurance Directorate (IAD)[0] to secure national systems. There are dangerous weaknesses in the US computer systems, and while a lot of the research on securing systems is done by private groups, government agencies are really the only ones that can sustain the funding and act as coordinators between private and public interests (eg, it's costly to secure the electrical grid, but there's a public interest in having one secure against attack). So hopefully the past few years have scared the NSA on to a saner course of supporting national defense instead of undermining it. And hopefully we can meaningfully collaborate with them on defense while fighting them on issues of privacy. [0] - https://www.iad.gov/iad/index.cfm https://www.iad.gov/iad/index.cfm

daxorid 9y ago

Again with the evidence-free Russian attribution hypothesis.

notadoc 9y ago
Regardless of attribution, do you not find it worrying?
- jpttsn 9y ago
  Attribution would appear central. I'd find it worrying if Voldemort was behind this, but I don't see how I could be worried about that possibility without attribution.
  - notadoc 9y ago
    Interesting approach. If you had a disease, would you not be worried until you figured out what specifically caused your disease?
    - jpttsn 9y ago
      Sure would. But if you told me chemtrails was behind it, I might ask you to show your working before focusing my worries on that.
rbanffy 9y ago
It seems to be a good match for the observed events.
- pabloski 9y ago
  What events? The fact that Russia is the second most targeted country? Come on, this is the same old and tiring fake news from the "famous" hungarian oligarch's mass media. Even CNN has admitted to have produced fake news on Russia and Trump http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread1176663/pg1 http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread1176663/pg1 Seriously, this bullshit about the russian is starting to become irritating. My dog died yesterday. I am sure, it was Putin who did it!

notadoc 9y ago

> The West needs to take this threat very seriously, or we'll soon find ourselves at the wrong end of the barrel of a new weapon. I agree with your assessment. But with US politics as they are, it is hard to imagine anything being taken seriously.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

knz 9y ago

> The West needs to take this threat very seriously, or we'll soon find ourselves at the wrong end of the barrel of a new weapon. Our geopolitical opponents should be cautious as well - Public knowledge of weapons technology is often decades behind the reality and I doubt the US and it's allies are unable to defend and respond to any large scale attack.

throwanem 9y ago
I doubt anyone failed to draw the intended meaning from the government messaging around Stuxnet.

fnovd 9y ago

I'm surprised to see even people on this site downplaying how worrisome these attacks are. The ability to shut down an enemy's computer systems remotely is an awesome power, and will only become more impactful as we rely more and more on computer systems in our everyday lives. Forget space: the internet is the next frontier. A group of enemy soldiers shutting down a hospital would be met with outrage and military backlash. A group of hackers shutting down fifty hospitals is met with jokes about outdated operating systems and derision towards IT directors. At what point do we stop treating these like annoyances of a strange new world and start treating them like what they are: targeted, military-grade attacks. The whole world can see how woefully unprepared the West is for attacks of this nature and the attackers are only going to grow more bold. The more intertwined tech is with the military, the more powerful the cyber-warfare paradigm becomes.

Mizza 9y ago
A thing you two aren't considering is the that US and the UK are the world leaders on the offensive side of this same technology, "we" just do a (slightly) better job of keeping this stuff contained. Raytheon, BAE, etc. all have cyber weapons development divisions and obviously GCHQ and NSA do their own internal development. The west's policy of "proportional response" will apply to cyber attacks as well. Not that this is an excuse for having unpatched systems or not designing for the catastrophe scenario, but we should remember that this is a two-way street.
- fnovd 9y ago
  >A thing you two aren't considering is the that US and the UK are the world leaders on the offensive side of this same technology Exactly, on the offensive side. I'm not particularly concerned about our ability to retaliate proportionally. But what good is a deterrent if it fails to deter attackers? Our defensive capabilities are clearly lacking, as these past few attacks have shown.
Ajedi32 9y ago
> A group of enemy soldiers shutting down a hospital would be met with outrage and military backlash. A group of hackers shutting down fifty hospitals is met with jokes about outdated operating systems and derision towards IT directors. The problem with this analogy is that, while an attack by a group of enemy soldiers is easily attributable to a specific nation, cyberattacks can be carried out by pretty much anyone; and it's not easy to say with confidence that a specific government organization orchestrated the attack. I'd be more inclined to compare this to a terrorist attack at an airport carried out by someone who managed to get a homemade bomb past security by simply slipping by while no one was looking. Outrageous, sure, but not necessarily easy to attribute to a specific nation, and probably preventable had security measures not been wholly inadequate.

pdkl95 9y ago

> Russia Accusations without evidence are irresponsible; incorrect attribution erodes trust and justifies resentment that lasts far longer than the current situation. The article discusses evidence suggesting that Ukraine was the target, but that's only circumstantially suggests that Russia may be responsible. Proper attribution of anything on the internet is already incredibly difficult. The history of false flags and other deception-based motives makes the problem even harder. > Best case is all sides escalate cyber-weapon "strength" to unthinkable levels and we enter a new cold-war standoff. No, the best case is for software authors to be held liable for the safety problems in the infrastructure they create. MAD isn't going to stop other parties - even script kiddies - from exploiting the same bugs. Yes, it will cost a lot of time and money, but we've known how to build secure systems for a long time[1]. Escalating another conflict between the two largest nuclear powers is a plan that has a very good chance of getting a lot of people killed. From the article: >> The Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: “[The attack] again proves the Russian thesis that such a threat requires cooperation on the global level.” I have a lot of issues with the current administration of Russia, but this is how we will survive the brave new technological world. MAD relies on the fear of retaliation; a far more reliable method of deterring hostilities is to create the situation where each side no longer wants a conflict, which can be accomplished with economic interdependencies. You don't bomb - conventionally, atomically, or with a weaponized computer virus - the business partners you rely on. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Computer_System_Evaluation_Criteria#A_.E2.80.94_Verified_protection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Computer_System_Evalua...

anthonybsd 9y ago
> The history of false flags Ukraine has a history of false flags? Do tell.
- pabloski 9y ago
  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/ukraine/1359353/Ukraine-admits-it-shot-down-Russian-airliner.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/ukraine/135...

pizza 9y ago

We should be concerned with evidence, cold hard truth, before premature escalation.

iammyIP 9y ago

You should stop posting your useless suspicions everywhere.

dang 9y ago
Please don't do this here, even if another comment seems useless or wrong. Instead, if you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; otherwise please don't comment until you do.
- iammyIP 9y ago
  Ok, agreed.

mtgx 9y ago

You would think that in such dire times, the Five Eyes would want adopt a stronger policy towards security and less towards leaving every PC and smartphone vulnerable to attacks to make surveillance easier. Instead, they're now getting ready to discuss how to backdoor devices and encryption at the upcoming Five Eyes and G20 meetings.

chocolatebunny 9y ago

Citizens are more likely to support a war if the affects are felt at home. Every child that dies in a hospital that is under attack will be a rallying cry for the masses.

belorn 9y ago

Maybe this was retaliation for Wannacry which exploit (EternalBlue) was developed by the west and causing havoc through a ransomware. It would follow a tit-for-tat escalation strategy in cold-war style. The NSA did not intended to have wannacry but I can easily see if an other nation do not care about the distinction. International laws would be nice. Few'er hospitals would be crippled by tax supported malware development. Focus could be spent on improving security and patching fault rather than hording and exploiting.

wu-ikkyu 9y ago

East vs West, Cold War, Politicians, "Cyber". Does anyone else find it foreboding that attacks like these are still being primarily framed within the terminology of a legacy 50+ year old threat model? "World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation." -Marshall McLuhan (1970)