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Ukrainian hackers destroyed the IT infrastructure of Russian drone manufacturer

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Re: Ukrainian hackers destroyed the IT infrastructure of Russian drone manufacturer

#431

Post by benced »

pjc50 wrote: post #140
mrweasel wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the late 90s, early 2000, the Danish department of defence decided that they needed a new procurement system, DeMars, built on SAP. I know a sergent that worked in procurement at the time, he made insanely large purchases of everything he was responsible for in the months leading up to the launch. It came to the point where he was pulled in for questioning, on the suspicion of fraud. He explained that he had no fa…

There's lots of pushes to add software to more of the military, but I don't think these kinds of resilience questions are really taken seriously. A system intended for wartime use will be running in non-optimal conditions while under constant attack. But many of these "enterprise" systems barely work better than paper to start with.

I think that's changed a bit - witness how reluctant the US gov is to be locked into Anduril Lattice. I think we'll see this start to change but certainly a lot of bad past decisions to make up for.

Re: Ukrainian hackers destroyed the IT infrastructure of Russian drone manufacturer

#432

Post by benced »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #63
mrweasel wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the late 90s, early 2000, the Danish department of defence decided that they needed a new procurement system, DeMars, built on SAP. I know a sergent that worked in procurement at the time, he made insanely large purchases of everything he was responsible for in the months leading up to the launch. It came to the point where he was pulled in for questioning, on the suspicion of fraud. He explained that he had no fa…

When HP converted to SAP, I think their production basically stopped, for six months, and they lost $400 million. Switching to a new system; even when it is for the better, is a painful, expensive process. The company that I worked for, did a successful transition to SAP, but it took about two years, and a lot of butthurt.

I remember reading an article about a hospital switching computerized medical record system and the CIO had a killer quote along the lines of "every extra day I take on this migration, people die"

Re: Ukrainian hackers destroyed the IT infrastructure of Russian drone manufacturer

#433

Post by amy214 »

BrandoElFollito wrote: post #66

I run a small home lab, about 30 services One day I decided to change my main disk and used the opportunity to rebuild everything from scratch and from backups. I was up in about an hour. And then I spent a week fixing this and that, ah yes I changed that too and, crap, I cannot remember why this thingie is set up this way. And some more. This is a one-man lab, with simple services, all on docker. I also work in IT.…

>This is a one-man lab, with simple services, all on docker. I also work in IT.

TBH your mistake was only running one layer of virtualization. What I do on my home setup is run a docker in a VM in a VM in a docker in a docker in a VM in a docker in a VM in a VM in a docker. This, I feel, ought to be the minimum level of indirection and virtualization in any technical configuration in perpetuity. Anything less is bush league and prone to errors.

Re: Ukrainian hackers destroyed the IT infrastructure of Russian drone manufacturer

#434

Post by trhway »

Lio wrote: post #381
vardump wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China has been a big winner, it can now get cheap energy and it gets to set Russia whatever conditions it pleases. Russia is now utterly dependent on China for many imports. Russia itself has been the biggest loser. Massive budget deficits, massive inflation. 1M of its smartest people have moved abroad. 1M Russian casualties in the war. Demographics and economy are disastrous. That and Russia is now a pariah state. N…

I think before the invasion of Ukraine the chance of China regaining Vladivostok would have been almost zero. Completely unthinkable. Now Russia is so dependant on China that they could just ask nicely for it back and Russia would have to hand it over without China firing a shot.

China is getting very long-term leases on large swaths of territory in the Far East. There is officially no exterritoriality, yet with increasing number of Chinese people there while Russian population there is minuscule (and even that is mostly not ethnically Russians, instead it is the local ethnicities whose history with China is much longer than with Russia), remoteness of Moscow and Russian bureaucrats' total corruption - there is no need for the official declaration. So, while today China still can't ask for Vladivostok and other "historically Chinese territories" (according to the modern Chinese official maps), tomorrow they wouldn't even have to.

Re: Ukrainian hackers destroyed the IT infrastructure of Russian drone manufacturer

#435

Post by martin82 »

BrandoElFollito wrote: post #66

I run a small home lab, about 30 services One day I decided to change my main disk and used the opportunity to rebuild everything from scratch and from backups. I was up in about an hour. And then I spent a week fixing this and that, ah yes I changed that too and, crap, I cannot remember why this thingie is set up this way. And some more. This is a one-man lab, with simple services, all on docker. I also work in IT.…

I would hope that military facilities follow better standards and are capable of recovering more quickly than a hobbyist...

Re: Ukrainian hackers destroyed the IT infrastructure of Russian drone manufacturer

#436

Post by ivanjermakov »

praptak wrote: post #26

Not many companies explicitly prepare for the scenario where every single data storage unit in the company is effectively wiped and you have to redeploy from zero. If you never bootstrap from zero (nor simulate this) then your systems probably have cycles in their deployment dependencies. Your config pusher is deployed from Jenkins/Puppet/Ansible but 2 years ago someone made Jenkins dependent on the config pusher for…

Reminds me of compiler bootstrapping. If you only have the source code of, let's say, Rust and want to build it you first need to have a Rust compiler of a previous version. And for that you need another compiler. Then you reach times when rustc was written in OCaml. And know what? Now you need to build OCaml compiler!

Other way is to build a stripped down version of rustc only capable of compiling latest rustc, e.g. using https://github.com/dtolnay/bootstrap

Great post on bootstrapping and its problems: https://bootstrappable.org/

Actual project capable of bootstrapping Linux system from scratch: https://github.com/fosslinux/live-bootstrap

Re: Ukrainian hackers destroyed the IT infrastructure of Russian drone manufacturer

#437

Post by mopsi »

ivan_gammel wrote: post #403
libertine wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Higher energy prices, and increased defence spending Energy prices are going down, and have been going down consistently ( https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/crude-oil ) and the new US Admin wants them even lower, and they're not alone. So that's settled. Defense spending will also be met with investment, jobs, etc. But if you think Europe is having it bad in terms of using taxpayers money to fund wars... what…

I think you are exaggerating Russian problems quite a bit. It’s certainly more stable than in 1990s or early 2000s. The peace deal will very likely force Ukraine and consequently its allies to recognize acquisitions at least de facto (Crimea may get formal recognition). Even if they won’t, there’s no plausible scenario in which Russia will lose this territory. Demographics — yes, but immigration may solve it for a wh…

> Even if they won’t, there’s no plausible scenario in which Russia will lose this territory.

Didn't the brightest minds in the Kremlin believe that the last time too?

There are many plausible scenarios, such as the worsening of socio-economic conditions, to the point where local governments stop following the central government and begin implementing their own policies shaped by local grassroots movements, leading to the total loss of control by Moscow. A repeat of 1989-1991. In that turmoil, nobody will care about Donbas or Crimea, as long as they can have food on their table.

We seem to be seeing the same recipe in action: extremely costly war for no clear purpose, economic stagnation, de facto bankruptcies of entire large sectors like mining and metallurgy.

Missing ingredients: low oil prices over extended time periods (6 years in the 1980s).

Re: Ukrainian hackers destroyed the IT infrastructure of Russian drone manufacturer

#440

Post by Mars008 »

torlok wrote: post #315
hosh wrote: post #307

The headline of the article called these people cyber activists, and in the text of the article, they were called cybercriminals. Which is it? It reminds me a bit with the situation with privateers during the age of sail. These were often people operating at the edge of the law, or even outright outlaws, given a letter of marque, a license to raid warships and commerce against a specific adversary. I'm sure out on th…

Russians are kiling civilians with drones each day. I don't think this is some gray area hybrid warfare, it's just regular people not wanting drones to kill their neighbours.

> Russians are kiling civilians with drones each day.

Same do Ukrainians, don't they? More over, long before they killed civilians and defenders in Iraq and Afghanistan on Americans invitation. Then left without even saying 'sorry'. Since 2014 they were shelling Donetsk just for fun, killing people at random. So, it's more complicated than you'll find in western mass media. Especially in EU where full picture is illegal.

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