Cyber Security: A pre-war reality check • Hacker News Board

Re: Cyber Security: A pre-war reality check

#31

Post by atemerev » Sat, May 18, 2024, 1:20 PM UTC

fabian2k wrote: post #22

roenxi wrote: post #20

> I know it sounds devastating, but you have to get used to the fact that a new era has begun. The pre-war era. It is madness that we're in a position where this can be baldly stated by a PM and there has been no "huh?" moment when people stop and assess how badly the broader West's military, economic and diplomatic efforts have failed over the last 30 odd years. Possibly longer. I wasn't expecting to see land wars i…

What kind of diplomacy would have prevented Russia from invading its neighbours?

Autocracies are inherently unstable and dangerous in this regard. They have every incentive to be irrational and unwilling to negotiate. They call it “sovereignty”, which it isn’t — just a sparkling dictatorship.

Autocracies have no place in the modern world.

Re: Cyber Security: A pre-war reality check

#32

Post by RGamma » Sat, May 18, 2024, 1:21 PM UTC

ahubert wrote: post #3

Author here - if you have any questions, please do let me know!

Good to see there's still some people vouching for old-school programming virtues. Among all the capital-driven centralization, scaling and complexification dominating the conversation I thought I was going crazy...

Re: Cyber Security: A pre-war reality check

#33

Post by nonrandomstring » Sat, May 18, 2024, 1:21 PM UTC

wkat4242 wrote: post #24

mikewarot wrote: post #19

When I recently asked some air traffic controllers what would happen if GPS became unavailable, it was grumpy sounds all around. I understand a scramble to vector everything to land everything would result in a very busy day for them, because suddenly most planes would be unable to safely navigate, and thus effectively grounded. Cutting the budget for ground based navaids is nuts, in my opinion.

They do have other ways to navigate. Like land-based beacons (VORs). Unfortunately these are being used less and less and even deprecated in favour of GPS waypoints. Even when they are still around the pilots have less experience with them because they no longer use them every day.

> Unfortunately these are being used less and less and even deprecated

Fortune may have something to do with it.

Like copper land communications that cost billions to establish over almost 100 years, are extremely resilient and can be repaired by anyone with a ladder and pair of pliers. They're being ripped out across Europe and the US because the private companies they were sold to want to shrug maintenance to squeeze out a little more profit.

It's just not your fortune.

Re: Cyber Security: A pre-war reality check

#34

Post by croes » Sat, May 18, 2024, 1:25 PM UTC

gds44 wrote: post #21

simmerup wrote: post #8

It does feel mad that we outsource so much of our national infrastructure maintenance to China. When/if they invade Taiwan, how are we going to do anything when they have that sort of leverage over us? It was bad enough with Russias gas

Well US is not dependent on anyone for her Energy needs. Unlike China. Its quite vulnerable on that front if a few pipelines blow up ala nord stream. This is also why the US has such a large presence in the middle east.

But you can pretty easily bring down their power grid

Re: Cyber Security: A pre-war reality check

#35

Post by croes » Sat, May 18, 2024, 1:26 PM UTC

rightbyte wrote: post #11

Who cares? In the case of some sort of big war why would you care about "cyber security" when the day to day problem is not dying from starvation, being drafted, radiation posioning or what ever the problem is. These kind of "we need to prepare" are silly since they implicitly downplay the severity of war and bring us closer to it.

The day to day problem will mainly exist because our computer systems are down.

Re: Cyber Security: A pre-war reality check

#36

Post by croes » Sat, May 18, 2024, 1:28 PM UTC

At the same time MS & Co. try to force everyone in to the cloud.

So if MS Azure AD goes down everyone goes down too.

Re: Cyber Security: A pre-war reality check

#37

Post by jeffrallen » Sat, May 18, 2024, 1:33 PM UTC

It is too bad he didn't follow up on "we give control to foreign clouds" with "we need European data sovereignty, our governments need to choose local cloud providers".

Because they exist. I work for one.

The cloud is just someone else's computer. But if that someone else is your neighbor, they may be motivated by the same things as you, and can contribute helpfully to your goals.

Re: Cyber Security: A pre-war reality check

#38

Post by nonrandomstring » Sat, May 18, 2024, 1:34 PM UTC

gostsamo wrote: post #13

Is there an enemy factor measure which reflects how many countries have to sanction/attack you directly before you are enable to maintain the economy and social services? It would be interesting to have an index of geostratigic resilience.

Yes. Front analysis [0] and also critical path analysis are useful.

Real graphs look like social networks, with some clusters and nodes with very high relational degree, and some with almost none. But for security they are more like dependency graphs rather than just attack paths as in Blotto. An adversary blockades/sabotages them or blocks those on which they depend etc. The more resilient graph is the best connected by alternative paths. Go back and look at some DARPA papers on route security in the formative "Internet".

What we have today are very insecure graphs with millions of logical dependency links going in/out of single centres of functionality, and not much peer connectivity.

Hit a few critical nodes and the whole lot goes down.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blotto_game

Re: Cyber Security: A pre-war reality check

#39

Post by Dalewyn » Sat, May 18, 2024, 1:38 PM UTC

gds44 wrote: post #21

simmerup wrote: post #8

It does feel mad that we outsource so much of our national infrastructure maintenance to China. When/if they invade Taiwan, how are we going to do anything when they have that sort of leverage over us? It was bad enough with Russias gas

Well US is not dependent on anyone for her Energy needs. Unlike China. Its quite vulnerable on that front if a few pipelines blow up ala nord stream. This is also why the US has such a large presence in the middle east.

>Well US is not dependent on anyone for her Energy needs.

China's strength is they have the means of production (and maintenance) of everyone today, including the US. All the energy in the world means jack squat when all the means of using that energy rely on China.

Could the west regain our own means of production? Certainly, but it's going to take far too long at the point China starts pursuing Bigger Gun Diplomacy. We're talking multiple decades to reachieve what we've surrendered, perhaps even the better part of a century because we simply don't have the ambition and political will to do so.

I think China has been very shrewd with how they conducted themselves in the past half century or so. They've already won most wars they might be involved in before they start by seizing the economies of their supposed enemies.

Re: Cyber Security: A pre-war reality check

#40

Post by gz5 » Sat, May 18, 2024, 1:39 PM UTC

>Why did it happen? Non-technical people have made choices and have optimized for stuff being cheap.

Yes and amplified by:

+ Cybersecurity 'bad actors' are decentralized and distributed. They innovate at speed, with no barriers, and share their innovation. Cybersecurity 'good actors' are centralized, proprietary and bounded.

+ Software and service providers traditionally couldn't build secure networking into their products - they had to delegate it to the consumer of the software or service for the consumer to implement as a day two bolt on. Dangerous when networking is often the largest and most vulnerable surface area.