3 ms·

One of the interesting thing that struck me, is that in the photos of computer screens, it appears they are using Windows. wtf? Now I'm nervous enough about th

by vlod 6y ago

One of the interesting thing that struck me, is that in the photos of computer screens, it appears they are using Windows. wtf? Now I'm nervous enough about these Windows zero day exploits to not use windows (using Ubuntu now). I just expected them to be even more paranoid than me.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
krona 6y ago
I severely doubt the computer of an analyst actually has anything like an internet connection. Anything 'exposed' to the outside world is basically assumed to be infected, including hardware. Ultimately many of the analyst tools they use are decades old, and only support Windows.
- vlod 6y ago
  It makes sense that an analyst would just shift through internal tools not connected, that process intelligence data. However, they must have s/w engineers. I'm curious how they do their jobs w/o stack-overflow, google and obviously HN. :) Yes, it's possible to do dev w/o an internet connection, but programming nowadays is a pita, especially as a full-stacker. i.e. I just had to deal with a sticky css footer problem and I would have topped myself if I didn't have the internet.
  - LodeOfCode 6y ago
    Maybe they have a separate computer for that? As long as it doesn't have anything secret on it, it shouldn't matter much if it's infected. Though they'd still have to be careful that what they search doesn't give anything away, and that an adversary might be injecting results, so maybe not.
  - content_sesh 6y ago
    You'd be surprised how far you can get with printed reference material. And especially if you're using mostly "boring"/"mature" technology. There probably are machines connected to the public internet, but if you need to lock your workstation, walk over to the designated unclassified machine, log in to that, do your search, write down or print the answer, log out of that machine, walk back to your workstation and then unlock it - every time you want to look up a CSS thing - you'd probably just ask your boss to buy you a dang book.

by vlod 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

krona 6y ago

I severely doubt the computer of an analyst actually has anything like an internet connection. Anything 'exposed' to the outside world is basically assumed to be infected, including hardware. Ultimately many of the analyst tools they use are decades old, and only support Windows.

vlod 6y ago
It makes sense that an analyst would just shift through internal tools not connected, that process intelligence data. However, they must have s/w engineers. I'm curious how they do their jobs w/o stack-overflow, google and obviously HN. :) Yes, it's possible to do dev w/o an internet connection, but programming nowadays is a pita, especially as a full-stacker. i.e. I just had to deal with a sticky css footer problem and I would have topped myself if I didn't have the internet.
- LodeOfCode 6y ago
  Maybe they have a separate computer for that? As long as it doesn't have anything secret on it, it shouldn't matter much if it's infected. Though they'd still have to be careful that what they search doesn't give anything away, and that an adversary might be injecting results, so maybe not.
- content_sesh 6y ago
  You'd be surprised how far you can get with printed reference material. And especially if you're using mostly "boring"/"mature" technology. There probably are machines connected to the public internet, but if you need to lock your workstation, walk over to the designated unclassified machine, log in to that, do your search, write down or print the answer, log out of that machine, walk back to your workstation and then unlock it - every time you want to look up a CSS thing - you'd probably just ask your boss to buy you a dang book.