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Nuclear weapons agency breached amid massive cyber onslaught
- seventytwo 6y agoWhat is it going to take for the US to do something about the threat from Russia?
- lwansbrough 6y agoNot sure! Trump assured the American people that "I have a son. He's 10 years old. He has computers. He is so good with these computers, it's unbelievable." Can't imagine why the US government hasn't formed a strategic response under Trump. His foreign policy has been so good over the past 4 years.
- blhack 6y agoFrom the actual article: >The U.S. government has not blamed any particular actor for the hacks yet, but cybersecurity experts have said the activity bears the hallmarks of Russia’s intelligence services.
- netsharc 6y ago"The hack was so sophisticated, there must be the evil scary country behind it!" "Their password was solarwinds123 and it was on their GitHub."
- onetimemanytime 6y agoUS has probably done worse to them. Tried at least so this is fair game
- tehjoker 6y agoNothing hopefully. Russia is a nuclear armed power and dicking around in cyberspace doesn't kill anyone. The US gave billions to get Yeltsin elected which far surpasses by orders of magnitude anything the US has alleged so far. https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/06/26/russian-election-interference-meddling/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/06/26/russian-el...
- arminiusreturns 6y agoIsrael is laughing at this kind of installed rhetoric.
- morsch 6y agoWhat it is going to take for the US to build secure IT systems?
- ntsplnkv2 6y agoThis is the result of 4 years of neglect in the oval office. This is a disastrous breach - but not a surprise under our current leadership.
- IndPhysiker 6y agoConsidering the OPM hack under the predecessor provided information on every person with a security clearance, I don't think it is quite fair to blame one as this sadly seems to be par for the course. I'm sure the incoming octogenarian will understand the series of tubes better...
- mhh__ 6y agoWhen you have the President firing people (Director of DHS Cybersecurity ring any bells?) for not playing his insane games, does the apple fall far from the tree? If you think the president needs to actually "understand" anything subtle like (even physical) security, you are being deliberately obtuse or naive.
- _-david-_ 6y agoThis hack happened prior to the firing.
- IndPhysiker 6y agoIt is pretty reasonable to say that managers need to have at least a cursory understanding of the business they are managing. That doesn't mean anyone expects a president to take a direct hand in selection of components for a security infrastructure, but rather have an appreciation that information security is quite serious and put competent managers in place over those decisions. Even a Director level position in any location in government is still rather far removed from the decision process as their purview typically includes HR, budgeting, procurement, regulatory oversight, and somewhere further down the pole is the actual work. That isn't naivete but reality of how this bureaucracy works.
- 6y ago
- naikrovek 6y agoWhy is all of this important stuff just hanging off the internet like it's a public webserver in a data center?
- AnimalMuppet 6y agoSo that they can get software updates.
- nitrogen 6y agoIt's kind of a lovely paradox -- connect to get software updates, but if you didn't connect you wouldn't need updates.
- AnimalMuppet 6y agoNot all bugs relate to internet connectivity. If you had a non-networked computer, you might still want bug fixes. For that matter, non-internet-connected computers can still be networked to each other using internet protocols, so they can still need bug fixes for internet stuff.
- naikrovek 6y agoNon-public networks are a thing... And there are other patch delivery mechanisms... This stuff was solved BEFORE the Internet was in widespread use.
- emptyparadise 6y agoOops your launch codes have been encrypted! What Happened to My Nuclear Deterrent? Your abort codes are encrypted and your nuclear arsenal has been placed at DEFCON level 1. Many of your ICBMs, submarines, launch silos, bombers and other facilities are no longer accessible because their communication channels have been encrypted. Maybe you are busy looking for a way to cancel the launch, but do not waste your time. Nobody can recover your abort codes without our decryption service. Can I prevent thermonuclear war? We guarantee that you can recover all your nukes safely and easily. But you don't have enough time. If you do not pay within 7 days, you will not be able to recover from nuclear winter forever. How do I pay? Payment is accepted only Bitcoin. Click for more information.
- SCLeo 6y ago"There we go again" *opens AES 256 decryption toolkit
- YarickR2 6y agoI wonder why does it look so simple, almost like an old style soldering iron.
- ronsor 6y agoI should've never opened that Nuclear_Update.pdf.exe attachment!
- rriepe 6y ago"Good thing Bitcoin is just one of our many projects."
- anonymouse008 6y agoThis would be a pretty wild explanation for the run on BTC recently
- maerF0x0 6y agowhat would be driving BTC up ?
- dvduval 6y agoI have to wonder how many corporations have been hacked but we will never know, because they are worried about the value of their stock. This could actually be a much greater threat to hobbling our infrastructure or blackmailing wealthy people to do their bidding.
- unclekev 6y agoI worked for a company that had all their Customer data stolen and then sold on a darknet market place. They completely swept it under the rug, told the infosec guys that if they talked about the incident with anyone they would have their employment terminated and that it was to never be discussed because they were worried about their share price. We also have laws here in Australia that says if this happens to a business it mandatory to disclose the breach to your customers. > you must notify affected individuals and us when a data breach involving personal information is likely to result in serious harm. A employee anonymously reported the breach to the government agency that handles this, who in turn contacted the business with a "Please explain. Right now." The next day after they were contacted they fired every single IT department staff member. Helpdesk, Infosec, Networks... All fired, because they couldn't figure out who reported it. Nothing ever happened to the business as they somehow convinced the government that the data that was stolen was "made up junk data used for testing" despite it being obviously clear that it was current customer info. This crap happens all the time and businesses are continued to be allowed to get away with hiding breaches from people. All it does is help the share price and disadvantage the customers.
- soupfordummies 6y agoWhy not name this company?
- unclekev 6y agoBecause they'll come after me for slander / defamation. Australian law provides almost no protection for speaking out against this kind of thing. Does not matter if it's true or not, it's still considered slander/defamation because you said something that makes the company look bad.
- bennettfeely 6y agoThe good news is that US nuclear weapon silos are stuck with 1970s technology. https://slate.com/technology/2014/04/huge-floppy-disks-and-other-old-tech-is-common-at-air-force-nuclear-missile-silos.html https://slate.com/technology/2014/04/huge-floppy-disks-and-o...
- toomuchtodo 6y agoReliable, boring old tech to the rescue.
- pengaru 6y ago> Reliable, boring old tech to the rescue. Reliable is not a word that comes to mind when recalling floppy disks of my youth.
- sushshshsh 6y agoReliable no, but difficult to access via a REST API yes
- nullsense 6y agoA Kubernetes cluster of nuclear weapons. Want mutually assured destruction? Simply deploy a helm chart!
- donw 6y agoFinally, Terraform and CloudFormation can truly live up to their names!
- runawaybottle 6y agoHave you heard of Amazon’s new Chaos Engineering as a service?
- deleted 6y ago
- RuggedPineapple 6y agoThe solarwinds hack gets more expansive every time we find out more. This really doesn't bode well.
- jand 6y agoAnd this is why all the "they got into our left pocket but could not access the right pocket" statements can be ignored for now. It would be better to assume that every network/system in smelling range of a Solarwinds sticker is compromised.
- wespiser_2018 6y agoYea, what concerns me is the sophistication of the attack, and just how widespread the damage/fallout is. The attack very good cover, while everyone scrambles to limit exposure and not sure exactly what to look for.
- bredren 6y agoWhat concerns me is lack of clear precedent for some equitable retaliation. And if some equitable retaliation is designed would there be public support for it if it were to include conventional warfare in some proxy fight. Much of the country has been told that China is the enemy and investigations into Russian interference in our country is a hoax. If this is more work from the fancy bear folks this is problematic. The US is a month away from a new president. The new president’s authority to act against this attack continued to be undermined by the sitting president who just fired the head of cyber command because he said the election itself was secure. Not because it wasn’t, but because he said it was to the public! I can not think of a more sophisticated and long term military intelligence operation than the epic we are witnessing right now. The United States could not be in a weaker position than now.
- sofixa 6y agoRetaliation for a cyber attack, with cyber attacks, sanctions, or military operations could set a dangerous precedent. Don't forget that the US and allies have been behind many cyber attacks, including against Russia and China ( and probably were involved with Stuxnet against Iran). Do you want Russia, China, Iran, etc. to retaliate against US cyber attacks? Because that's how you get an escalation. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberwarfare_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberwarfare_in_the_United_S...
- neom 6y agoMuch better article: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/12/17/nuclear-agency-hacked-officials-inform-congress-447855 https://www.politico.com/news/2020/12/17/nuclear-agency-hack...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Firerouge 6y agoDang, the link should be replaced with this one. The reuters article is a single sentences simply referencing this original article
- traes 6y agoI love that it's impossible to tell if you're mildly upset at the current state of this post or asking a mod to change it.
- ineedasername 6y agoThat's the beauty of it: many invocations of "dang" in HN will be done for both reasons. I don't know the origin of that username, but it's grown into it's role.
- hisnameismanuel 6y agohis name is Dan G
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jacquesm 6y agoI think he even has a trigger on that which sometimes leads to funny situations.
- 6y ago
- clankyclanker 6y agoWe’re all still here, so it could’ve gone slightly worse. Maybe not much, though.
- sjg007 6y agoI wonder if we have dead man switches.. In a MAD world you would want to launch without human intervention from isolated systems.... I wonder how that would work... maybe it's not possible.
- clankyclanker 6y agoAt least two, one for each Cold War power: - ERCS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/DRC-8_Emergency_Rocket_Communications_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/DRC-8_Emergency_Rocket_Comm... - Perimeter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Hand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Hand
- ehnto 6y agoI have always wondered, if I were at the helm of a government asserting MAD capabilities, I would probably just not hold up my end of the bargain. Threatening MAD makes total sense, but once your enemy has assured your own destruction, is there much sense in actually following through? All you are doing is assuring millions of innocent people die for the actions of some generals. All this to say, that it is unthinkably inhuman to have MAD be an automated response.
- xyzzyz 6y agoYour enemy might have intelligence that will allow them to learn that your MAD is a bluff, in which case they have all incentive to attack immediately.
- loopz 6y agoEven modern conventional warfare utterly destroys countries, like Syria. So nothing to gain compared to science, technology and trade.
- bigphishy 6y agoI am pointing the finger at Microsoft for allowing bad security practice in windows kernel, architecture and other aspects of the Windows operating system. I am have to hand it to Microsoft for the good job security. However without knowing the extent of the incident, and going off of this part: "At this point, the investigation has found that the malware has been isolated to business networks only..." It is more than likely this news story is overblown.
- google234123 6y agoYeah, and if MS tries and change this and make the kernel more secure I would expect huge outrage on HN from people complaining about MS restricting their freedom.
- mindslight 6y agoHaving the police put a lock on your front door that you don't have the key to will technically make your home "more secure", but not in any way that's useful. Locking down devices is actually just giving up on security. Trusted code and centralized review don't scale. Real security implies effectively mediating between many different interacting parties, not simply reducing the number of them.
- gnramires 6y agoUAC (User Account Control) is some of the best thing Microsoft ever did for their security (and it might have inspired android permission system), probably following the Unix. I feel my naivete of complaining at the time I had to click a security prompt. It's still sorely missing fine-grained control like network access (perhaps even fine-grained network access control), and access to various devices and folder locations; within reason, the more controlled and restricted the better. Linux ought to make a move in this front and gain ground on security advantage: shouldn't we be able to give access to specific processes (say an installed game or text application) to specific folders and devices? Why should a game be able to read all my files (and not just its own folder), and why should any of those be able to use the network?
- ineedasername 6y ago
- echelon 6y agoIt feels like we're in the calm before the storm and nobody is watching the approaching squall. China growing in power and influence, flexing itself on the global stage. The US waning internationally, citizens divided and full of hate. We're factory-less, fab-less, and have fewer educated. Fewer consumers. Lots of debt. We have SpaceX, but China's pace of exploration and international cooperation is increasing faster than NASA's. The only advantage I can think of us our military and navy, but China has carrier-killers and ICBMs. Zoomers on TikTok hate capitalism and the military, and it seems like they're being indoctrinated by an "algorithm". Or maybe it's the lack of opportunity we're providing for them. If and when our tech companies and entertainment companies get leapfrogged, what will we have to export that brings us wealth? What happens to democracy and liberty when the top economy and producer in the world is a single-party state? I hope we're hacking back just as hard. That's what the NSA should be doing rather than domestic spying.
- advisedwang 6y agoI hear a lot of fear that the US may no longer be on top, from which I assume you are an American. The good news is that Americans (as individual humans) may be better off when America is no longer an empire. The British empire was good for the rulers and owners of the companies integrated into it, but not for the average brit.
- maerF0x0 6y agoany proof of this besides your word? I'd love to read about it.
- jtdev 6y agoToo bad Biden is a China lap dog...
- mhh__ 6y agoMeanwhile the President salutes Kim Jong-Un
- gen220 6y agoBit of a misleading title by Reuters. They accessed the business networks of the NNSA, the agency responsible for maintaining the nuclear stockpile, but did not access the networks managing the actual nuclear weapons, as the title half-implies. There was no threat of random nuclear weapon exploits, those networks have not been compromised as far as we know.
- Andrex 6y ago> They accessed the business networks of the NNSA, the agency responsible for maintaining the nuclear stockpile, but did not access the networks managing the actual nuclear weapons, as the title half-implies. That they know of / are admitting at this time. The damage could really be far worse. It's hard to tell right now I think.
- ehnto 6y agoA cold comfort. That is still incredibly embarassing.
- vl 6y agoWell, it looks like they started to build up narrative for another military deployment once new president is in power, who cares about specific details?
- curiousllama 6y agoYea, also, who would build a nuclear bomb that could be detonated via the internet? I would be outright shocked if there wasn’t a mechanical part of the process... eg, in the early days, they literally had the warhead and bomb parts physically separated
- dundercoder 6y agoHopefully the networks that have launch and scheduling are fully airgapped.
- blabitty 6y agohttps://threatpost.com/air-gap-attack-turns-memory-wifi/162358/ https://threatpost.com/air-gap-attack-turns-memory-wifi/1623...
- plankers 6y agoThat's for data exfiltration. Wouldn't be useful for sending launch and scheduling commands.
- rurban 6y agoThere is an automatic response system ARS in place. On both sides. Tit for tat was still a thing decades ago, until it was mathematically proven to be not a good strategy. Movie recommendation: https://letterboxd.com/film/virus/ https://letterboxd.com/film/virus/ The better japanese version is also on youtube.
- ineedasername 6y agoNobody worry: There's a security company named SolarWinds that has a lot of experience when it comes to getting hacked, and they've already got contracts with the Federal government. Working together, I'm sure the Feds & SolarWinds can leverage those existing relationships to help get to the bottom of this situation and make sure it never happens again.
- sjg007 6y agoHas anyone tracked if these guys donated to the GOP and Trump?
- javaIsGreat 6y agoI see this company has been consulting for government agencies for 20 years so idk if you can blame Trump for this one, But it does look like the founders (who don't seem to be be involved with the company anymore for almost a decade) are repubs (biggest donation is 10K and mostly to Oklahoma and Texas regional politicians not national candidates): https://www.fec.gov/data/receipts/individual-contributions/?contributor_name=yonce https://www.fec.gov/data/receipts/individual-contributions/?...
- ineedasername 6y agoThey're a government contractor. In all probability they give to both parties, and have lobbyists in D.C. taking congressional aides on both sides of the aisle out for cocktails on a regular basis. What it comes down to is that incompetence is very much bipartisan, if not outright apolitical.
- sigmaprimus 6y agoDoes this mean the nuclear systems are less secure than the voting machines?
- sigmaprimus 6y agoWow, I must have touched a nerve with my question. Didn't mean to Red Pill anyone, just critical thinking. SoZ
- jtdev 6y agoIt seems that the U.S. approach to “cyber” defense is a complete shit show... I can’t imagine the level of incompetence and bureaucracy that led to this Solarwinds oversight - this is amateur hour stuff.
- forgingahead 6y ago"Most secure <whatever> in history!" /s
- GartzenDeHaes 6y agoClickbait nonsense.
- swalsh 6y agoResponding to this might be Bidens first major international crisis. Would not want that job.
- Trasmatta 6y agoAs if dealing with COVID and growing domestic extremism weren't enough
- throwaway201103 6y agoCOVID is solved. We have two effective vaccines now approved. It's just a matter of time to get them distributed at this point.
- Trasmatta 6y agoCOVID is not solved. There are massive vaccine distribution problems to solve, vaccine misinformation campaigns to work against, and the 10's of thousands or 100's of additional deaths that will happen between now and widespread immunity. And you could of course include the economic fallout of COVID under the same umbrella, which is nowhere close to being solved.
- kevin_thibedeau 6y agoLet's see how many are denied the second booster shot.
- 29athrowaway 6y agoWhen you reward loyalty over competence, shit like this is just a matter of time.
- 29athrowaway 6y agoAlso, this: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-cybersecurity-fbi-russian-hackers-b1776007.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
- 2Gkashmiri 6y agoSo USA can blatantly infiltrate Iran with stuxnet but God forbid anyone try the same back to them. Oh no
- joana035 6y agoLet's update Doomsday clock!
- yangff 6y agoSo, in 2033 somebody will plant A-BOMB from Militech in Arasaka Tower and kill 500000 is not just a story?
- maerF0x0 6y agoNo worries, too many bugs will make it DoA
- vuciv1 6y agojeez this is terrifying. can someone just give me peace of mind that I'm not going to be nuked
- 3131s 6y agoDefinitely aliens.
- CapriciousCptl 6y agoGiven the scope of the attack I think it’s reasonable to assume all high value targets were compromised in someway. It’s more a matter of what specifically was compromised, what data was exfiltrated, how much of the attack was offline, are Thunder going to start breaking a as la stuxnet etc.
- pyronik19 6y agoBut the voting machines, they were fine. Biden obviously won.
- TruthHurts44 6y agoYes he did, go suck dick.
- glasss 6y agoWith how widespread this event has been, I would wager that those scam emails saying they have "recorded you relieving yourself, and you must send X bitcoin or we'll expose you" must be true for at least one person at these agencies / companies.
- maerF0x0 6y agoStux to be them. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet
- noirchen 6y agoYes evidence, more evidence, just like the good ol' time that US had evidence from Nayirah, and Powell wielded a tube of wash powder in UN claiming that was WMD. I do believe that President Trump deserves a Nobel Peace Prize, because with so many evidences, his precedents, including our be-loving Obama, would have bombed the hell out of our designated enemy.
- jaequery 6y agoWhy the hell do they even have these top secret data over the network? They should cold store anything sensitive.
- slaymaker1907 6y agoIt's difficult and expensive to store this data without access to any network at all. Anything sent via email would still have to be sent via some other method if you didn't have email.
- coolgod 6y agoHow come this community of self-proclaimed hackers and independent thinkers are so quick to believe whatever "cyber-attack" related news that gets published?
- mechnesium 6y agoClassified networks are typically air gapped.[1] Doubtful that hackers obtained anything useful. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_gap_(networking) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_gap_(networking)
- sterlind 6y agoWouldn't be so sure. Data is eventually copied out of the airgapped side, e.g. NSA exploits are developed in the airgap and copied to an attack staging server on the Internet. And there's one-way connectivity into the airgaps via data diodes. So it's possible that a sufficiently advanced malware got through the data diode, infected the airgap side and hitched a ride out over sneakernet.