111–120 of 294 posts
I've found my experience designing gearboxes for Boeing has applicability to software design. For example, the fundamental idea with airplane design is not to design components that cannot fail, as that is impossible. The idea is to design the system to be tolerant of failure . Every part in the system is not "how can we make this part never fail" but "assume it failed. How does the airplane survive?" This is a funda…
I've found my experience designing gearboxes for Boeing has applicability to software design. For example, the fundamental idea with airplane design is not to design components that cannot fail, as that is impossible. The idea is to design the system to be tolerant of failure . Every part in the system is not "how can we make this part never fail" but "assume it failed. How does the airplane survive?" This is a funda…
1. What happens when the root password is guessed by a malicious person?
2. What happens when a trusted employee is really an enemy agent?
3. What happens when we download and install a malicious update from a trusted vendor?
4. What happens when the server room burns down?
5. What happens when a malicious USB stick is plugged into our secure network?
6. What happens when our CEO's laptop gets stolen?
And so on. I deliberately wrote "when", not "if".
I've found my experience designing gearboxes for Boeing has applicability to software design. For example, the fundamental idea with airplane design is not to design components that cannot fail, as that is impossible. The idea is to design the system to be tolerant of failure . Every part in the system is not "how can we make this part never fail" but "assume it failed. How does the airplane survive?" This is a funda…
Yea but airplanes still crash all the time
On "60 Minutes" they reported that the hardware in your computer is likely compromised as well, so new hardware will have to be bought. This has a simple fix I've advocated for years. Put the firmware for disk drives, USB sticks, embedded systems, etc., in ROM. Or at least provide a physical write-enable switch for updates. I have no idea why people responsible for security do not demand this. I would expect them to…
A literal turn-key switch on the case would work. Turn the key one way to enable firmware updates. Turn it the other to disable them. This should also be easy to replace and come as a standard sized device. As an alternative, a 'security card' slot; similarly easily replaced or with an internal switch depressed re-'paired' to a new key.
I've found my experience designing gearboxes for Boeing has applicability to software design. For example, the fundamental idea with airplane design is not to design components that cannot fail, as that is impossible. The idea is to design the system to be tolerant of failure . Every part in the system is not "how can we make this part never fail" but "assume it failed. How does the airplane survive?" This is a funda…
That's an interesting thought but I'm not sure if it can be applied to software. Part of what makes security hard seems that it only takes a single point of failure in a chain of dependencies to go bad. If there is a loophole on one server OS, then it's everywhere deeply ingrained in software. Even if you split the data, wouldn't the underlying platforms all have that flaw? Ironically the greatest advantage of softwa…
It certainly can be. But you've got to design it in from the beginning.
But the first step is pretty hard - convince programmers that writing perfect software is impossible and to stop relying on it being perfect. Fire anyone in charge of security who certifies "the system is secure". :-/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're completely right, this wasn't a complicated attack at all. The two most notable items here are, Solarwinds has horrible security practices and those customers who were affected by the attack, also have horrible security practices. In a correctly secured environment it wouldn't have been possible for a infected Solarwinds server to connect out to a C2C server.
100% this no ports should be allowed in or out by default and every port open justified - if you can’t get out a payload is useless.
It looks like they are trying to limit their liability by claiming there was nothing at all that they could have done.
I've found my experience designing gearboxes for Boeing has applicability to software design. For example, the fundamental idea with airplane design is not to design components that cannot fail, as that is impossible. The idea is to design the system to be tolerant of failure . Every part in the system is not "how can we make this part never fail" but "assume it failed. How does the airplane survive?" This is a funda…
That's pretty much the concept of defense-in-depth, and breaches like Solar Winds of others like this kind of threat actors, are so sophisticated that they do work around every single aspect of this.
Their password was "SolarWinds123".
Everyone who gets pwnd tells a story about sophisticated state actors to make it sound like some unstoppable force has hit their impenetrable defences.
Largest impact, sure. But architecturally it was a relatively simple formula - compromise a widely used package and sleep on it until it was pervasive enough to be a valuable hack. I disagree with this being the most sophisticated though. Unless I'm missing something about this hack, the Stuxnet[1] architecture, complexity, and long term planning feel far more sophisticated than the SolarWinds hack. [1] https://en.wi…
Anyone have insights on what part of the attack might have taken a thousand people?