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Romanian friends have told me that this is really due to corruption. Specifically: - government gives IT/data contracts to cronies - cronies don't actually do any real security work to protect the data - things like this happen
Like whenever someone gets caught in a compromising situation they say they "were hacked", as if saying that means anything.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A blockchain is the logical extreme of where you end up when you think about how to sync backups It's not. Blockchains are only eventually consistent among nodes. They're designed for synced backups among adversarial peers. There's no reason for a government agency to use one internally. There are better ways to sync backups when the people with access to make updates are also authorized to do so.
Internally, you don't need it, agreed. But that is centralization risk exemplified in this incident. Which isn't necessary. Every notary could be a node. It would be a lot more resilient, and it would look a lot like a blockchain (not necessarily with a crypto currency though) if you do it properly.
A git repo with cryptographically signed commits solves all the same problems without the headache.
> Since the hack, officials restored their website and posted a message announcing they are rebuilding the agency's entire network from scratch. Even if the hacker claims they deleted backups, the agency appears to have had an offline copy, otherwise things would have gotten really messy over the coming months in Romania. So it seems not all has been lost. I was worried about the societal implications of being unable…
The sad part is, the whole world worked perfectly fine without anything online, ever, prior to 20 years ago. Even 10 years ago for slow-moving change. It's literally not a requirement to have it all online. And the cost of developers, plus coding + security updates + platform costs, really just means you replace a few assistants which would process requests by hand, with all that. Except? It's a lot harder to hack a…
If we start thinking along the lines of technology has risk and we shouldn't use it, we should go back all the way to the discovery of fire as we all know fire can cause a lot of damage if in the wrong hands.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If they deleted the blockchain db from the nodes, this is still lost. Blockchain doesn't have anything esp. to do with data loss. It solves exactly one problem which is distributed double spending in accounting ledgers.
A blockchain solves the problem of consensus under Byzantine faults. Payments are an incidental use case, and not even a good one because managing payments including avoiding double spending can be achieved with a weaker primitive than consensus.
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Romanian friends have told me that this is really due to corruption. Specifically: - government gives IT/data contracts to cronies - cronies don't actually do any real security work to protect the data - things like this happen
Same thing is rampant in other Eastern European countries as well. Tips on how to address this for those of us that are publicly minded?
Imagine if the hacker was more clever and started writing plausible nonsense into the database, corrupting the backups.
> Since the hack, officials restored their website and posted a message announcing they are rebuilding the agency's entire network from scratch. Even if the hacker claims they deleted backups, the agency appears to have had an offline copy, otherwise things would have gotten really messy over the coming months in Romania. So it seems not all has been lost. I was worried about the societal implications of being unable…
The sad part is, the whole world worked perfectly fine without anything online, ever, prior to 20 years ago. Even 10 years ago for slow-moving change. It's literally not a requirement to have it all online. And the cost of developers, plus coding + security updates + platform costs, really just means you replace a few assistants which would process requests by hand, with all that. Except? It's a lot harder to hack a…