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>> This is the very definition of an accident How is something deliberately planned and executed, by a military intelligence agency, for weeks or months, an ac

>> This is the very definition of an accident How is something deliberately planned and executed, by a military intelligence agency, for weeks or months, an accident? And how are you so sure Merck's IT team didn't fail to have backups, redundancy, security patches, etc. to prevent an attack of any sort from being such a big deal?

tchaffee 7y ago
Did that military agency plan for it to damage Merck? Or was that an accident?
- listenallyall 7y ago
  Are you serious? They planned to launch the equivalent of a digital bomb, knowing full well there would be plenty of collateral damage. Hell no it isn't an "accident" I will put it another way. I feel quite confident the 9/11 bombers did not know, or specifically target, my friends and acquaintances who died in those towers. Therefore, are you going to claim 9-11 was an accident? If I intend to rob a convenience store, and in the process of doing so, my gun goes off and the clerk is shot and killed, was it just an accident?
  - tchaffee 7y ago
    Yes I am serious. Are you? How about we keep this respectful and do away with the condescending tone, which is not really welcome here on Hacker News? 9/11 was presumably intended to damage as much property and kill as many people as possible. So no, the people who died as a result of that terrorist attack against the US were not killed by accident. Yes, if your gun accidentally goes off during a robbery, that is by definition an accident. An accident that could have been avoided if different choices had been made, but still an accident. If the intended target in this case was the Ukraine, and companies in the USA suffered immense damages it's reasonable to ask if those unintended consequences were accidental. Similar to how a bomb dropped on an Italian border in WWII might accidentally kill ally French citizens on the other side of the border. With cyber warfare it becomes much more interesting, because those accidents don't respect physical distance.
    - corodra 7y ago
      That's called manslaughter... You don't get to walk when you rob a place and "accidentally" shoot someone. A sassy judge should ask "Did you accidentally rob the place too?"
      - tchaffee 7y ago
        To be more specific, involuntary manslaughter. Which is broadly speaking an accident that occurred while committing a crime. Or due to some other negligence. We are still firmly in the territory of accident, regardless of the legal consequences.
        corodra 7y ago
        You still get punished for it... That's the whole argument. Even it's an accident, it's not the same kind of accident as turning a corner and spilling coffee on them.
        tchaffee 7y ago
        The thread is not about whether or not whoever did it gets punished. The question is whether or not it was accidental or if damaging Merck was an intentional act. Based on the evidence so far, it sure seems like damaging Merck was a result of negligence and not intentional.
        corodra 7y ago
        Releasing a computer virus intended to replicate and spread on any machine it can... like... wtf are you arguing for? The whole point to the thing was to cause massive damage to whoever the intended target was, with little care for collateral damage. It was meant to spread hard and fast and cause damage. If you infected a Merck employee with weaponized ebola and that employee traveled to the USA while the strain was still in incubation, then got USA citizens sick with ebola, "Oh, it's okay, it was just an accident. No worries! You didn't mean to hurt the USA. Want to have some cheesecake with us?" Replace the USA with Germany, Japan, Chile, Mexico, South Sudan, I don't care. I'd feel just as strongly about this. It's not a Russia-USA issue. It's a "Russia literally gives zero fucks what happens to the world." I don't see bags of rice given out to poor countries with the Russian flag on it. It was intentional even if Merck wasn't targeted. Negligence and accident aren't magic words to hide behind if your initial goal is to cause harm in the first place. Stuxnet at least had a bunch of parameters and was highly specialized so it only deploy on its intended target with little to no chance of opening up its payload on an unintended target. I'm not going to argue whether or not Stuxnet was morally in the right. But, it sure as shit proves there is a format of trying to make sure unintended targets don't get harmed in the process of widespread release of cyber warfare.
  - corodra 7y ago
    Not arguing with you. But I think a digital bioweapon is a better analogy than a bomb. Since it spreads without control after release, like a... well... virus. If a country released a bioweapon somewhere and it affected "un-intended targets" there's going to be a lot of international problems with that. I kind of feel, and I'm not going to pretend I'm an expert, that digital warfare should be treated closer to biological warfare than just your typical bombs and bullets kind. Generally, and holy shit I know someone is going to flip their shit for me saying this, but generally a regular bomb (not nuke) is an acute type of problem. After it goes off, it's GENERALLY harmless after that. Yes, structure collapse, contamination, gas leaks and other after effects. But not really more booms from the bomb. Weaponized ebloa can still make more people sick, not affected by the original release. Same with NotPetya and other cyber attacks. After deployed, it can affect more and more targets as time goes on.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
t0ddbonzalez 7y ago
>"And how are you so sure Merck's IT team didn't fail to have backups, redundancy, security patches, etc. to prevent an attack of any sort from being such a big deal?" If the insurance claim is ~$1.3bn, we can safely say that the NotPetya cleanup isn't a trivial thing for them. How many companies have we heard about who were totally screwed after a ransomware outbreak, because their only backups were online - network connected? Does anybody have offline backups anymore? Is corporate IT negligent where it appears to have no disaster recovery plan?
- blaser-waffle 7y ago
  > Is corporate IT negligent where it appears to have no disaster recovery plan? Arguably, yes. Merck isn't a small time start-up. They've been on the Fortune 500 list for 60+ years. They can afford whatever layers of backup and redundancy they need. > Does anybody have offline backups anymore? Previous gigs, for large ISPs and related orgs, did. This was on a team-by-team basis, though.
- MrMorden 7y ago
  Any large organization that doesn't, at a bare minimum, implement NSA's Top Ten Cybersecurity Mitigation Strategies[1], ASD's Essential Eight[2], etc. is grossly negligent; and an insurance carrier willing to write a policy not conditional on implementing those strategies is equally negligent. The insurance carriers in this case could very well be attempting to deny payment under the acts-of-war exclusion because they're too incompetent or greedy to correctly write a cybersecurity policy. [1] https://www.nsa.gov/Portals/70/documents/what-we-do/cybersecurity/professional-resources/csi-nsas-top10-cybersecurity-mitigation-strategies.pdf https://www.nsa.gov/Portals/70/documents/what-we-do/cybersec... [2] https://www.cyber.gov.au/publications/essential-eight-explained https://www.cyber.gov.au/publications/essential-eight-explai...
  - listenallyall 7y ago
    >> too incompetent or greedy to correctly write a cybersecurity policy Don't discount the insurers just yet. The act of war exclusion is likely preferable for the insurers because it would seem to broadly cover the entire incident and because it really doesn't require a whole lot of detailed discovery into Merck's internal processes. But if that fails, then the insurers will, most likely, once again try to deny the claim, this time focusing on the details of the cybersecurity-based policy exclusions. My guess, with no evidence to back it up, is that the policy is very detailed and specific, and upon investigating its application, the insurers will reveal a lack of proper defense and mitigation processes by Merck, just as you describe.

tchaffee 7y ago

Did that military agency plan for it to damage Merck? Or was that an accident?

listenallyall 7y ago
Are you serious? They planned to launch the equivalent of a digital bomb, knowing full well there would be plenty of collateral damage. Hell no it isn't an "accident" I will put it another way. I feel quite confident the 9/11 bombers did not know, or specifically target, my friends and acquaintances who died in those towers. Therefore, are you going to claim 9-11 was an accident? If I intend to rob a convenience store, and in the process of doing so, my gun goes off and the clerk is shot and killed, was it just an accident?
- tchaffee 7y ago
  Yes I am serious. Are you? How about we keep this respectful and do away with the condescending tone, which is not really welcome here on Hacker News? 9/11 was presumably intended to damage as much property and kill as many people as possible. So no, the people who died as a result of that terrorist attack against the US were not killed by accident. Yes, if your gun accidentally goes off during a robbery, that is by definition an accident. An accident that could have been avoided if different choices had been made, but still an accident. If the intended target in this case was the Ukraine, and companies in the USA suffered immense damages it's reasonable to ask if those unintended consequences were accidental. Similar to how a bomb dropped on an Italian border in WWII might accidentally kill ally French citizens on the other side of the border. With cyber warfare it becomes much more interesting, because those accidents don't respect physical distance.
  - corodra 7y ago
    That's called manslaughter... You don't get to walk when you rob a place and "accidentally" shoot someone. A sassy judge should ask "Did you accidentally rob the place too?"
    - tchaffee 7y ago
      To be more specific, involuntary manslaughter. Which is broadly speaking an accident that occurred while committing a crime. Or due to some other negligence. We are still firmly in the territory of accident, regardless of the legal consequences.
      - corodra 7y ago
        You still get punished for it... That's the whole argument. Even it's an accident, it's not the same kind of accident as turning a corner and spilling coffee on them.
        tchaffee 7y ago
        The thread is not about whether or not whoever did it gets punished. The question is whether or not it was accidental or if damaging Merck was an intentional act. Based on the evidence so far, it sure seems like damaging Merck was a result of negligence and not intentional.
        corodra 7y ago
        Releasing a computer virus intended to replicate and spread on any machine it can... like... wtf are you arguing for? The whole point to the thing was to cause massive damage to whoever the intended target was, with little care for collateral damage. It was meant to spread hard and fast and cause damage. If you infected a Merck employee with weaponized ebola and that employee traveled to the USA while the strain was still in incubation, then got USA citizens sick with ebola, "Oh, it's okay, it was just an accident. No worries! You didn't mean to hurt the USA. Want to have some cheesecake with us?" Replace the USA with Germany, Japan, Chile, Mexico, South Sudan, I don't care. I'd feel just as strongly about this. It's not a Russia-USA issue. It's a "Russia literally gives zero fucks what happens to the world." I don't see bags of rice given out to poor countries with the Russian flag on it. It was intentional even if Merck wasn't targeted. Negligence and accident aren't magic words to hide behind if your initial goal is to cause harm in the first place. Stuxnet at least had a bunch of parameters and was highly specialized so it only deploy on its intended target with little to no chance of opening up its payload on an unintended target. I'm not going to argue whether or not Stuxnet was morally in the right. But, it sure as shit proves there is a format of trying to make sure unintended targets don't get harmed in the process of widespread release of cyber warfare.
- corodra 7y ago
  Not arguing with you. But I think a digital bioweapon is a better analogy than a bomb. Since it spreads without control after release, like a... well... virus. If a country released a bioweapon somewhere and it affected "un-intended targets" there's going to be a lot of international problems with that. I kind of feel, and I'm not going to pretend I'm an expert, that digital warfare should be treated closer to biological warfare than just your typical bombs and bullets kind. Generally, and holy shit I know someone is going to flip their shit for me saying this, but generally a regular bomb (not nuke) is an acute type of problem. After it goes off, it's GENERALLY harmless after that. Yes, structure collapse, contamination, gas leaks and other after effects. But not really more booms from the bomb. Weaponized ebloa can still make more people sick, not affected by the original release. Same with NotPetya and other cyber attacks. After deployed, it can affect more and more targets as time goes on.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

t0ddbonzalez 7y ago

>"And how are you so sure Merck's IT team didn't fail to have backups, redundancy, security patches, etc. to prevent an attack of any sort from being such a big deal?" If the insurance claim is ~$1.3bn, we can safely say that the NotPetya cleanup isn't a trivial thing for them. How many companies have we heard about who were totally screwed after a ransomware outbreak, because their only backups were online - network connected? Does anybody have offline backups anymore? Is corporate IT negligent where it appears to have no disaster recovery plan?

blaser-waffle 7y ago
> Is corporate IT negligent where it appears to have no disaster recovery plan? Arguably, yes. Merck isn't a small time start-up. They've been on the Fortune 500 list for 60+ years. They can afford whatever layers of backup and redundancy they need. > Does anybody have offline backups anymore? Previous gigs, for large ISPs and related orgs, did. This was on a team-by-team basis, though.
MrMorden 7y ago
Any large organization that doesn't, at a bare minimum, implement NSA's Top Ten Cybersecurity Mitigation Strategies[1], ASD's Essential Eight[2], etc. is grossly negligent; and an insurance carrier willing to write a policy not conditional on implementing those strategies is equally negligent. The insurance carriers in this case could very well be attempting to deny payment under the acts-of-war exclusion because they're too incompetent or greedy to correctly write a cybersecurity policy. [1] https://www.nsa.gov/Portals/70/documents/what-we-do/cybersecurity/professional-resources/csi-nsas-top10-cybersecurity-mitigation-strategies.pdf https://www.nsa.gov/Portals/70/documents/what-we-do/cybersec... [2] https://www.cyber.gov.au/publications/essential-eight-explained https://www.cyber.gov.au/publications/essential-eight-explai...
- listenallyall 7y ago
  >> too incompetent or greedy to correctly write a cybersecurity policy Don't discount the insurers just yet. The act of war exclusion is likely preferable for the insurers because it would seem to broadly cover the entire incident and because it really doesn't require a whole lot of detailed discovery into Merck's internal processes. But if that fails, then the insurers will, most likely, once again try to deny the claim, this time focusing on the details of the cybersecurity-based policy exclusions. My guess, with no evidence to back it up, is that the policy is very detailed and specific, and upon investigating its application, the insurers will reveal a lack of proper defense and mitigation processes by Merck, just as you describe.