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Cyber Security: A pre-war reality check

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Re: Cyber Security: A pre-war reality check

#101

Post by z3phyr »

atemerev wrote: post #65
z3phyr wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet autocracies are historically the most "successful" types of governments. Humans always and eventually end up selecting autocracies with thunderous applause.

History is young, there’s too little data to go for meaningful conclusions yet, particularly post-industrial revolution. But yes, I agree, autocracy is a natural state of affairs. Democracy is a miracle to keep.

There is not much difference in the capability of human experience. I bet a baby born in 494AD, teleported to the modern period and raised by modern humans will be indistinguishable in capability to every other human being.

Re: Cyber Security: A pre-war reality check

#102

Post by alextingle »

mike_hearn wrote: post #50
ahubert wrote: post #3

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

You talked a lot about how bad it is for governments to outsource stuff to Huawei and a handful of US clouds, but didn't really touch on what drive all those decisions beyond claiming it's due to non-technical leadership. It'd be great to see a somewhat deeper analysis than that in future. There are plenty of tech companies that also outsource a lot to the cloud, so it has to be more complicated than that, and there…

> Indeed, one reason to outsource stuff to a handful of giant providers is that they do a much better job of security overall.

Is that really true?

Shifting infrastructure to the cloud makes it cheaper, it reduces the incidence of security problems, but it magnifies the impact of security problems when they do occur.

Is that a "better job". How do you measure that?

Re: Cyber Security: A pre-war reality check

#103

Post by hughesjj »

killjoywashere wrote: post #71
crocal wrote: post #9

I cannot agree more with the author’s point of view. As an illustration, many people want to use GPS for the safe positioning of trains in the European Train Control Systems. This makes the space sector happy because it justifies the expenditures incurred for putting things like Galileo in orbit. However, in a pre-war check exercise, one immediately come to the conclusion that all European trains would crawl to a sto…

Not sure I entirely agree? #1 > Or disable a hospital. The entire Ascension Healthcare system of hospitals (142 hospitals, 2600 total facilities) in on divert since 8 May because they had to switch back to paper records. Change Healthcare has lost $872M since it was attacked in February. Maybe it's more like the pandemic: seems like nothing, unless it affects you . https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascension_(healthcare_…

The back of my head is screaming "defense in depth! Redundant systems!"

The whole idea of the internet (and even some of our infra, like suburbs or highways/rail) is that there's no one single point of failure. Like designed-to-survive-nuclear-war redundant.

Definitely incorporate the most advanced tech you can for when things are going smoothly to get that efficency gain, but there's a reason all branches of the military (that I'm aware of) still train and test their aptitude using paper maps and trig instead of relying 100% on GPS and electronic devices.

Re: Cyber Security: A pre-war reality check

#104

Post by stouset »

indymike wrote: post #83
killjoywashere wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure I entirely agree? #1 > Or disable a hospital. The entire Ascension Healthcare system of hospitals (142 hospitals, 2600 total facilities) in on divert since 8 May because they had to switch back to paper records. Change Healthcare has lost $872M since it was attacked in February. Maybe it's more like the pandemic: seems like nothing, unless it affects you . https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascension_(healthcare_…

> Change Healthcare has lost $872M since it was attacked in February. The question is, what is the cost to secure? I've been in so many meetings where the cost of security is 10-15x the cost of a breach. It's horrifying.

Part of this is that nobody has cared about security since the beginning, for basically anything in tech.

It’s an industry-wide issue that permeates every level of the stack. And so yeah, individual companies trying to retrofit security onto a jenga tower of technology is going to have to spend a ridiculous amount of resources to have any kind of impact.

I don’t know what the answer is, but I too believe things won’t change until the day someone figures out how to push a “kill all humans” OTA update to all the self-driving cars on some random Tuesday afternoon.

Re: Cyber Security: A pre-war reality check

#105

Post by Dalewyn »

hughesjj wrote: post #103
killjoywashere wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure I entirely agree? #1 > Or disable a hospital. The entire Ascension Healthcare system of hospitals (142 hospitals, 2600 total facilities) in on divert since 8 May because they had to switch back to paper records. Change Healthcare has lost $872M since it was attacked in February. Maybe it's more like the pandemic: seems like nothing, unless it affects you . https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascension_(healthcare_…

The back of my head is screaming "defense in depth! Redundant systems!" The whole idea of the internet (and even some of our infra, like suburbs or highways/rail) is that there's no one single point of failure. Like designed-to-survive-nuclear-war redundant. Definitely incorporate the most advanced tech you can for when things are going smoothly to get that efficency gain, but there's a reason all branches of the mil…

>The whole idea of the internet (and even some of our infra, like suburbs or highways/rail) is that there's no one single point of failure. Like designed-to-survive-nuclear-war redundant.

The reality of course is that the internet has turned into a fragile, centralized system of complication that rests on single failure points like Cloudflare, AWS, and Chrome. The internet as envisioned by DARPA would have survived to be used by cockroaches, the internet today would not survive.

Re: Cyber Security: A pre-war reality check

#106

Post by baobun »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #81
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.

Cuba would be the most resilient nation on earth I’d guess

Why?

Re: Cyber Security: A pre-war reality check

#107

Post by hollerith »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #80
hollerith wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It seems like a reasonable assumption to me that major world powers probably have enough 0-days at any one time that they could use them together to format a significant proportion of the world’s computers and phones. If that is true, then how come we have not heard much about erasure of data on phones and computers in Ukraine by Russian hackers? Please don't say that the Kremlin is holding its 0-days in reserve for…

Probably for the same reason why they aren’t using their nuclear weaponry.

Isn't that a fully-general argument? I say that flywheels will cause a revolution in military affairs. You reply with, "Why haven't we seen flywheels used in war?" I reply that flywheels are such a potent weapon that armies are afraid to deploy them out of fear that their enemy will response by using flywheels against them, which would be just too terrible and might cause a global ecological catastrophe or a general breakdown of society.

Re: Cyber Security: A pre-war reality check

#108

Post by mike_hearn »

alextingle wrote: post #102
mike_hearn wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You talked a lot about how bad it is for governments to outsource stuff to Huawei and a handful of US clouds, but didn't really touch on what drive all those decisions beyond claiming it's due to non-technical leadership. It'd be great to see a somewhat deeper analysis than that in future. There are plenty of tech companies that also outsource a lot to the cloud, so it has to be more complicated than that, and there…

> Indeed, one reason to outsource stuff to a handful of giant providers is that they do a much better job of security overall. Is that really true? Shifting infrastructure to the cloud makes it cheaper, it reduces the incidence of security problems, but it magnifies the impact of security problems when they do occur. Is that a "better job". How do you measure that?

Well, fair point. If you consider blast radius of failure then maybe it's worse off yes. But then the issue is not them doing a bad job but that too many people rely on them doing a good job,

Re: Cyber Security: A pre-war reality check

#109

Post by FL410 »

labcomputer wrote: post #100
dweekly wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The good news here is that the fine folks at the FAA have spent a lot of time thinking about how to keep aviation secure in a GPS denied environment, which is their basis for the build out of the VOR MON. https://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/at...

> FAA have spent a lot of time thinking about how to keep aviation secure in a GPS denied environment, which is their basis for the *build out* of the VOR MON That’s an interesting characterization, given that the MON is a list of VORs they are not planning to take down .

But that's better than taking them all down. Fact of the matter is most of us hate using VORs anyway, and left to our own devices probably wouldn't care one bit if they were removed.

It is a good thing that someone is second-guessing that. Degrading to MON wouldn't be great, but it would be much preferrable to hoping poor ATC can figure out how to vector everyone all the sudden.

I think more industries could apply the idea of a Minimum Operational whatever

Re: Cyber Security: A pre-war reality check

#110

Post by pixl97 »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #33
wkat4242 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 squee…

Copper land lines cost a fortune to maintain, and with everyone having moved to cellphones years ago, don't generate income to pay for their upkeep. People pay far more for an internet line that dumps out a gig of traffic, while very few pay for a hard line that is hard to cut and only carries a few kb of traffic.
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