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U.S. to work with Big Tech, finance sector on new cybersecurity guidelines
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- dudus 5y agoWe can't let the EU have all the fun
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- bpodgursky 5y agoI'm thrilled that the government, big tech, and finance are working in lockstep to safeguard my rights and privacy. It's very generous of them. I rest assured knowing that I will never be locked out of any one of my accounts; should I get on the wrong side of any of them, I'll be locked out of both the financial system, the internet ecosystem, and be on the wrong side of the law, for my own safety and digital health. Building a better future, together.
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- pjbeam 5y agoChecklists are not the answer. Some kind of liability framework seems like the answer. And perhaps through such a lens we'll discover that some businesses simply shouldn't exist.
- AlotOfReading 5y agoStandardization is how most other industries address safety. It's not ideal in many ways, but it's better than the nothing we live with today.
- relaunched 5y agoYou see it with HIPAA. It's unclear whether the financial liability causes companies to invest in security and that work discourages hackers. Or, if hackers aren't as interested in customer data / healthcare records. Seems like the low hanging fruit is just to infiltrate a network and figure out how to get it to mine monero.
- candiddevmike 5y agoI think HIPAA is a good example, especially the somewhat infectious nature of business agreements. There are serious penalties with leaks, and the BAs leave everyone liable (and very, very cautious). I do think the teeth of the law make a lot of HIPAA leaks go unreported. I imagine the almost crippling financial and reputational impact gets weighed heavily against the cost of getting caught.
- joe_the_user 5y agoThe only way to have liability is ... show people didn't follow a checklist. The main way to show a restaurant is liable for getting people sick is to show they didn't follow the health code, the main way to show a company is liable for fire is to show they violated various codes, etc.
- MereInterest 5y agoWell, yes and no. You can have liability on inputs or liability on outputs. For restaurants, liability on outputs would mean a restaurant being liable for any food poisoning that occurs within X hours of eating there. But, human health has many confounding factors, so the inputs are easier to measure and to impose liability on. For computer security, I'd want to see liability on results, and not just on the methods and the checklists. If a company has a data breach, then that's something for which they can be held liable. That might mean that it becomes much more expensive to maintain large databases on users, which would be a good change.
- joe_the_user 5y agoFor restaurants, liability on outputs would mean a restaurant being liable for any food poisoning that occurs within X hours of eating there. You kind of run up against that old English Common Law principle that a defendant is innocent until proven guilty with that idea. In simple situations, outcomes can work. If you intentionally cause someone to die, you're guilty of murder no matter how you manage to do that (but a chain of causation still needs to be proven, a rough correlation is patently arbitrary and unjust). But complex situations where causation is complicated require standards - proving someone intentionally killed someone in traffic would be hard if there were no traffic laws.
- silisili 5y agoAgreed. My last few experiences with 'security officers' were that they knew how to read off a checklist, and check said checklist. None of the three had any clue if what we were saying was even true. Or what it would mean if it weren't. To make myself more clear: checklists might be ok, if the checker can scour the code and prove such things. I've never met one that does or even seems to have the ability to.
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- MarkSweep 5y agoOne area the US government could really make a difference in cyber security is making identify theft more difficult. Currently all you have to do to defraud banks is get your hands on some government issued numbers (social security numbers and driver licenses). If the government created an identify system that was no so easy to impersonate, some types of hacking and data leaks would not longer cause problems to the public.
- mc32 5y agoGiven the push to have vaccination passports and people not pushing back hard on that aspect of privacy, probably pushing through a digital national ID might be as ripe as it’s ever going to be.
- mariojv 5y agoI think a regular national ID was attempted under the Obama administration but failed due to pushback, if I'm remembering correctly. The closest we got was Real ID, passed in 2005, which is barely being implemented fully now, over 15 years later. It makes me wonder how long it would take a true national ID system with digital verification, maybe something similar to Estonia's, to take to actually implement. It would have to be something not left to each state to handle, or it'd suffer the length and per-state disparities of Real ID.
- dragonwriter 5y ago> I think a regular national ID was attempted under the Obama administration but failed due to pushback, if I'm remembering correctly. Not really. There was some discussion of it during the period of the Bush Administration which turned into Real ID (2005 was well before Obama was elected), but it's a stretch to call even that, much less any murmurings during the Obama Administration, an “attempt”. > It makes me wonder how long it would take a true national ID system with digital verification If you mean a mandatory one, mandatory ID faces Constitutional issues that are central to the US conception of liberty, so probably a collapse of the Constitutional order. If you mean available standardized digital ID with digital verification, well, TSA had an RFI that closed in June preparatory to a rulemaking on adding digital ID, including digital verification, standards into the Real ID standards, because a number of states have digital ID efforts and there is a demand for them to qualify as Real IDs, because of the uses for which Real IDs already are (and the more that thet will be in the next couple years) mandated for l.
- bluedino 5y agoA huge joke. If you have ever had to work with the DoD you may have had to deal with CMMC. It's totally ridiculous. At least it will boost the economy by adding thousands of security officer jobs and pad the pockets of any security vendor, and drive system administrators nuts by having to deal with shit like Microsoft Azure GCC High
- barsonme 5y agoOr the wonderful world of FIPS and Common Criteria.
- Nexxius 5y agoCMMC is a framework that wasn't really there before. Sure it has bad points but, it at least moves things forward in the right direction and makes things more visible. The problem I've encountered with it is that PHBs want things hidden or "creatively mitigated" to pass inspection. Security would be much better if an independent 3rd party were used to audit all RMF/CMMC packages. That is usually not the case.
- relaunched 5y agoWe're getting closer and closer to cyber and kinetic warfare intermingling regularly. Attacking a US company may become akin to attacking a US citizen. State backed or State sanctioned actors will be looked at as an agent of the state itself. Hacks will lead to proportional responses from governments against governments. It's not much different than our military and contractors protecting domestic oil company interests abroad.
- mc32 5y agoWhat do you do in the case the actor is using a weak state as cover? Send a surgical strike into a country that aside from having the presence of the bad actor had nothing to do with it?
- midev 5y ago> Send a surgical strike into a country that aside from having the presence of the bad actor had nothing to do with it? Work with law enforcement agencies in those countries to apprehend the person. If the country won't cooperate or shields the attackers, then sure, a drone strike could work.
- smhost 5y agoExtra-judicial executions for unauthorized information access is not the right way to conduct yourself as a nation.
- midev 5y agoHard disagree. First, you downplay "unauthorized information access". Foreign adversaries have targeted our industrial SCADA systems, which can lead to death and destruction. Second, there's no moral absolutes that dictate how a nation should act. I value the lives and information of my family and friends more than I value the lives of someone attacking them. Don't like it, don't attack... :shrug:
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- sennight 5y ago> ...as President Joe Biden appealed to private sector executives to "raise the bar on cybersecurity." So a new banner has been hoisted, under which some lobbyist interests will be serviced, and if this results in any security improvements - it will be a happy accident. Here, I'll fix the problem for you Biden - here is what you say: "Today I've been directed to announce that... I've directed the Department of Justice to investigate the negligent actions of companies that have contributed to the growing trend of identity theft and associated crimes." Boom, problem solved. This solution is well known, and has been for as long as I can remember. If somebody fills their orphanage-for-the-blind adjacent warehouse full of TNT, and a chain smoking burglar breaks in... the warehouse owner isn't the victim.
- yellow_lead 5y agoWhat good can come from this? "We want to improve our cybersecurity - lets engage the biggest technology companies in the country." If we invite them all to a luncheon, their collective knowledge of "cyber" must lead to something good, right? Except all of these executives likely have limited understanding of cybersecurity at best. At worst, they or their team already thought up regulations to help crush early companies, and this is an opportunity to get them through.
- supertrope 5y agoThe year is 2026. Cyberattacks have escalated to the point that megabanks are offline for weeks at a time, power grids go dark for ransom, airliners are guided into deadly collisions, a database of every American's Social Security Number is leaked, and drinking water is sabotaged by remote criminals. The USA CYBERSAFE ACT is passed with overwhelming bipartisan support. It mandates trusted federal security co-processors in every computer, key escrow, a national firewall at every ISP, an end to crime enabling online anonymity, and a chain of custody for all actions done on a computer: logs must be retained by a licensed business IT department or manufacturer of a consumer device for two years. Root access is a felony.
- 80386 5y agoThe year is 2027. Power grids still go dark for ransom, but at least the internet has been turned back into TV. If you know how to use Linux, you might be able to pick up a fourth podcast!
- cinquemb 5y agoSounds pretty bullish for decentralized systems
- Aperocky 5y ago> megabanks are offline for weeks at a time Yeah not going to happen. Might happen to government, but not banks. Banks are incentivized by profit, and being offline pose extreme risk to profit. Government are just mostly self promoting bureaucracy until something goes really wrong, and then it's still the same bureaucracy.
- tehjoker 5y ago"Cybersecurity" = Companies must coordinate more closely with the national security state Doesn't sound so nice when you put it like that.
- d4mi3n 5y agoThat is one of many ways to address these issues. The underlying problem that needs to be resolved is that the average security posture of most companies is bad and we (US citizens and anyone else vested in the economic well being of the US) need to do better. Sadly, incentivizing people and organizations isn't always good enough--technical hiring is difficult for most orgs to begin with, the market for technical security specialists is smaller than that of software engineers, and good security is an ongoing business function. Fixing this at a systemic level will take a broad variety of initiatives: some governmental, some driven by insurance/liability frameworks, and initiatives (government, industry, or social) to encourage more people to get into security.
- mikewarot 5y agoReal security is being able to run any program against a set of data, and knowing for certain that there won't be any undesired side effects. What systems can do that?
- BarryMilo 5y agoWhat are you even talking about?
- mikewarot 5y agoIn the 1980s we used to be able to buy "shareware" floppy disks for $3 at user group meetings. These things had all sorts of cool stuff on them. We didn't have to worry about our computers being permanently damaged, because back then, unlike now, our operating systems were on write protected, easily copied floppy disks. Our hardware wasn't smart enough to house any trojan horses, so you knew it wasn't at risk. We had computer security. Not because MS-DOS was such an amazing piece of code, but rather the hardware was simple enough that you couldn't hide a trojan in it. The job of an operating system is to protect the hardware, and allow the user(s) of a system to use the resources without risk. NONE of the current crop of operating systems we use 40 years later is suitable for the job, not Linux, Windows, MacOS, iOS, Android, the cloud. Now that even the cheapest persistent storage is likely to have multiple levels of firmware, it's up to the operating systems to virtualize the hardware, and keep applications from directly touching it. NONE of our current crop of systems do that. All this "cybersecurity" spending is just a grift if it doesn't deliver actual computer security.
- theodpHN 5y agoBiden Taps K-12 Nonprofits Code.org, Girls Who Code to Improve US Cybersecurity https://slashdot.org/submission/14440845/biden-taps-k-12-nonprofits-codeorg-girls-who-code-to-improve-us-cybersecurity https://slashdot.org/submission/14440845/biden-taps-k-12-non...
- balgan 5y agoDirector of Engineering - Security from Coalition here (we participated in the event) - We committed to building more free security tools for all organisations to protect themselves. We’ve already made Coalition Control our Attack Surface discovery and monitoring platform free (https://control.coalitioninc.com https://control.coalitioninc.com) and we will continue to add more features and more tools for free there. If there are any questions,I am happy to answer them!
- joe_the_user 5y agoWhat kind of create standards could you create? Some thoughts: 1) Certain infrastructure should be off the net automatically - pipelines, water treatment plants and similar things (or online with hardware guaranteed one ways connections). 2) Standards for testing backups. 3) Standards for IoS devices (a million insecure Internet light bulbs, what could possibly go wrong). 4) Standards for not having a hundred companies auto-updating onto the systems of critical infrastructure companies.
- balgan 5y agoThe great thing about insurance is that we don't just get to create baselines our policyholders must adhere to, we also get to enforce them. A perfect example of this is anyone that has a policy with us must have RDP behind VPN/ whitelisted only to specific IPs. I spent years trying for free to convince orgs to do this and was ignored, here we convince all our policyholders to do it and everyday more and more companies as we onboard them. For backups, not only do they need to have it, they need to be tested, kept offline and encrypted - this doesnt apply to all its split by revenue bands/industry/mix of other logic. IoT devices - they get notified in Control if we find any on the internet and told to not have them directly exposed
- balgan 5y agoThe same thing we do with RDP we also do with any critical vulnerability we notify customers in Control (example all of the latest Exchange vulns)
- 5y ago