So apparently Russian hackers were able to infiltrate the Office 365 accounts of multiple federal agencies. They were able to do to this by targeting one of the government's suppliers, a company called "SolarWinds" in Austin. The hackers were able to slip their software into a software update from SolarWinds over the summer. And get this: "SolarWinds says on its website that its customers include most of America’s Fo…
Well thanks to working at a large org I can say the mountains of pointless conversations that anyone has to dig through to find anything useful is the biggest security feature. Not the security tech.
I mean this is the govt we are talking about. Known for inefficiency and incompotence. The person or team going through that shitpile is probably at high risk of brain damage.
Its easy to find something juicy happening in one dept, like looking down a random manhole in a giant sewage system. But to figure out the dynamics across the system is why govts end up employing tens of thousands of people. Which no nation state or group can match. If Singapore or Dubai or Switzerland leak thats a much simpler sewage system. But the US is operating at a totally different scale. Killing or manipulating a few ants wont change giant ant hill behavior other than in Star Wars movies.
We are still in the stone age in how we deal with large data describing large systems. The list of large leaks and breaches will grow but look for/at impact, filtering out the noise from the sky is falling buffoon class.