British Parliament Hit by Cyberattack, Affecting Email Access
1–10 of 27 posts
Re: British Parliament Hit by Cyberattack, Affecting Email Access
#2To what extent are our security problems the result of feature creep and an inability to lock down simple protocols? For all the bloviating about national borders and so on, if a country can't secure its own legislature then its institutions are broken.
Re: British Parliament Hit by Cyberattack, Affecting Email Access
#3They should ban encryption to catch those hackers!
Re: British Parliament Hit by Cyberattack, Affecting Email Access
#4To what extent are our security problems the result of feature creep and an inability to lock down simple protocols? For all the bloviating about national borders and so on, if a country can't secure its own legislature then its institutions are broken.
I wouldn't get too grandiose about saying the institutions are broken. It's just email, why not consider it like postal mail? Definitely not good, definitely needs to be fixed, but also definitely does not mean the legislature entirely is not secured or that institutions are all broken.
Re: British Parliament Hit by Cyberattack, Affecting Email Access
#5In what way have they been 'hacked'?
Constituents can email their MPs and I'd imagine they all share the same few email servers. It's not hard to imagine that someone thought they'd 'have a go' (as was the case during the election period), and the reaction by Parliament has so far been a precautionary one.
Re: British Parliament Hit by Cyberattack, Affecting Email Access
#6Real title:
> British Parliament Hit by Cyberattack, Affecting Email Access
Clickbait title. Access to email has been disabled as a precaution because passwords were being trafficked and there were attempts to access accounts.
Re: British Parliament Hit by Cyberattack, Affecting Email Access
#7Real title: > British Parliament Hit by Cyberattack, Affecting Email Access Clickbait title. Access to email has been disabled as a precaution because passwords were being trafficked and there were attempts to access accounts.
Thanks! We've updated the title from “British Parliament Email Hacked”. Submitters, please use the original title when possible: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Re: British Parliament Hit by Cyberattack, Affecting Email Access
#8To what extent are our security problems the result of feature creep and an inability to lock down simple protocols? For all the bloviating about national borders and so on, if a country can't secure its own legislature then its institutions are broken.
Not sure why this is downvoted. The main reason systems aren't secure is lack of simplicity.
To put it another way, pentesting is almost always the art of exploiting complexity. It's true that you can have a system that's both simple and broken, but that's the exception.
Re: British Parliament Hit by Cyberattack, Affecting Email Access
#9"Bugger! My hard drive is encrypted and they're demanding bitcoins! Do any of you blokes know the pounds to bitcoins rate?"
Re: British Parliament Hit by Cyberattack, Affecting Email Access
#10To what extent are our security problems the result of feature creep and an inability to lock down simple protocols? For all the bloviating about national borders and so on, if a country can't secure its own legislature then its institutions are broken.
Not sure why this is downvoted. The main reason systems aren't secure is lack of simplicity. To put it another way, pentesting is almost always the art of exploiting complexity. It's true that you can have a system that's both simple and broken, but that's the exception.
> The main reason systems aren't secure is lack of simplicity.
I don't think it's that simple.
There are two ways you can look at simplicity:
1. The lack of needless complexity, which is just another way of saying something is well built
2. Smaller modular components that do less and have clearer interfaces, ie: the unix way.
If you mean the 1st, then sure, the main reason systems aren't secure is lack of being well built.
But if you mean the second, all you're really doing is taking security concerns and spreading them out over more components. This makes them easier to reason about, but also means more entities need to reason about them. Like all things in engineering there are only trade offs, no pure wins.