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Cisco aids Ukraine defense with modified switches to counter Russian attacks
- hardkorebob 3y ago[flagged]
- losteric 3y agoWho is "we"? Selling to whom? Why stop?
- vore 3y agoCisco not only stopped but in fact never did either of those things, so they're already way ahead of you!
- NoToP 3y agoThough, has anyone ever considered, packet delivery via mortar shell?
- whalesalad 3y ago[flagged]
- HHC-Hunter 3y ago[flagged]
- whalesalad 3y ago[flagged]
- gambiting 3y ago[flagged]
- toss1 3y agoSo, you are just fine with the local bully stealing your lunch or the global autocrats stealing out democracy? If we aren't better armed, prepared, and willing to forcibly defend against aggression, our lunch and democracy will get taken. Every time.
- Unfrozen0688 3y ago[flagged]
- exxos 3y ago[flagged]
- fredgrott 3y agothey tried that once, that is how Russia and China were able to close off their own internet loops...via Cisco's own help.
- russelg 3y agoWhy? Sounds like they made good improvements to their product. It would be cool if these improvements make it to other customers.
- vore 3y agoI think the US government would rather make Cisco stay in politics.
- sneak 3y ago[flagged]
- morkalork 3y agoYeah! Let's all boycott Cisco and switch to Huawei! /s But seriously, you can try stay out of politics but politics isn't going to stay out of your business. Just look at what happened to Nortel..
- jakobson14 3y ago[flagged]
- dralley 3y agoStarting with the fact that the precursor to the internet was created via defense spending.
- beretguy 3y ago[dead]
- mellow-lake-day 3y ago>The reliance of Ukraine’s substations on GPS for time synchronization, a standard in industrial control systems for its accuracy and affordability, becomes a vulnerability when faced with such jamming. >Cisco’s response involved shipping a large order of modified equipment, specifically designed to maintain accurate time even under radio jamming conditions. This solution employs the Cisco Industrial Ethernet switch with an internal crystal oscillator, enabling new clock recovery algorithms for accurate timekeeping when GPS is unavailable. That's really neat. Didn't know GPS was also used for time synchronization.
- whalesalad 3y agoIt’s really the only way to do accurate time.
- gambiting 3y agoWell no, it isn't - it's just that every other solution is several orders of magnitude more expensive.
- whalesalad 3y agoSo the pragmatic approach that everyone is utilizing (including AWS’ latest announcement for microsecond accuracy) relies on hardware GPS. Why am I being attacked here. This is how it’s done.
- pwagland 3y agoI'm not the one attacking you, but I think I can explain. Your original statement was quite absolutist "It’s really the only way to do accurate time." A statement which would have had more agreement would be "It’s really the only practical way to do accurate time."
- whalesalad 3y agoFair.
- technofiend 3y agoPolitics aside, if there was ever a time for an Apollo-like moonshot program to build secure infrastructure and write secure code, it's now. Thanks to wide dissemination of techniques, Attack As A Service and even AI-assisted hacking, the bar to mount attacks just keeps getting lower. The real answer is to build resilient systems with zero backdoors rather than trying to put the hacking genie back in its proverbial bottle.
- jakobson14 3y agoApollo was a scramble to get the absolute minimum tin can to the moon as fast as possible which wouldn't kill the 2-3 men inside it. Building anything secure is a detail-oriented endeavour. It is not solvable with a moonshot. The question I have for cisco is: why are these special features for resisting cyberattack not standard on EVERY router?
- peblos 3y ago“Cisco’s response involved shipping a large order of modified equipment, specifically designed to maintain accurate time even under radio jamming conditions.” Probably not something most Cisco customers need or want
- jakobson14 3y agoRead the article in full. Timekeeping upgrades and cold-weather functionality are the flashy headlines that are easy to explain to the masses, but there's plenty in there about russian cyberattacks too. Russia has been attacking ukrane's infra over the internet for over a decade now.
- sgift 3y agoWell, as usual, the answer is a mix of cost and usability. I don't know if people outside of Germany remember it, but there was a big splash when it came out the NSA hacked Merkels phone. Our chancellor! Why doesn't she have a secure phone?! What do our security authorities even do?! Well, the thing is .. she had one. And it probably wasn't hacked. But the usability of these secure phone is so bad (one common thing is that everyone needs one, which has to be compatible with each other) that she usually just used the phone that her party gave her (she was also the head of the party), which was a normal smartphone and the NSA hacked this one. Same goes for switches etc. There are no real standards, everyone does a bit of their own thing, so you have a bunch of incompatibility. Then you need to configure them special, which takes more time and effort and so on. And, at the end of the day, there's always the matter of cost. Resisting cyber attacks means probably different chips, which are safe according to e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempest_(codename) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempest_(codename), and the software has to be checked extra and programmed to different standards. Someone has to pay for this, simple as that. Also, if you are not the US, the US will probably want to have a say in whether Cisco can sell you such machines. Same goes for other companies and their countries.
- 3np 3y agoRe-report of https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/22/cisco_modded_switch_ukraine/ https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/22/cisco_modded_switch_u...
- twelve40 3y agothanks, didn't notice that link at the bottom, this article seemed much more coherent. All the hacking FUD aside (sitting here trying to figure out how or why would malware perform GPS jamming?), this seems to be the root cause: > jamming activity is primarily carried out to interfere with missile guidance systems, but a knock-on effect is disruption to grid operators
- instagib 3y agoSo they put a rubidium oscillator in the Cisco boxes or upgraded their current equipment line. slide 15 has other solutions to gps denial. https://www.gps.gov/cgsic/meetings/2016/silverstein.pdf https://www.gps.gov/cgsic/meetings/2016/silverstein.pdf IEEE 1588-2008 is a good solution at 10 updates per second.
- aaron695 3y ago[dead]
- secondary_op 3y agoLet's hear about offence Cisco puts out against US enemy states, or even against subordinate states just in case.
- hulitu 3y ago> Cisco aids Ukraine defense with modified switches to counter Russian attacks So they changed the password for the backdoor [1]. /s [1] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/cisco-backdoor-hardcoded-accounts-software,37480.html https://www.tomshardware.com/news/cisco-backdoor-hardcoded-a...