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America's cyber defenses are being dismantled from the inside

theregister.com

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Re: America's cyber defenses are being dismantled from the inside

#71

Post by K0balt »

ryao wrote: post #7
esskay wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the same reason the US considers its self the "leader" of the world. You can't have it both ways, if you want to "lead", you've gotta pay for it.

Has the U.S. ever claimed to be the leader of the world? I do not think any country has ever claimed that title. The closest to it would be some of the remarks that are supposedly made to each Pope upon becoming Pope. That said, there is the similar sounding title called “the leader of the free world” applied to the U.S. president since the end of WWII. I always thought that was the result of military alliances, not…

The USA has, by any measure, a veritable monopoly of coercive force on the world stage. Their military expenditure is more than the next 15 countries combined.

This means they have the capability to enforce their will globally to a significant extent. In an arena such as geopolitics, justice is the will of the stronger, no holds barred. This makes the USA arguably the primary concern in geopolitics, the ring you need to kiss to do anything on that stage.

Keep in mind that “claimed” may be referring to the sense of “won” rather than “stated”.

From that perspective it’s not too much of a stretch to call them the world leader, but that does ignore the fact that leadership implies the will to lead and to a significant extent the requisite wisdom and skills.

Re: America's cyber defenses are being dismantled from the inside

#72

Post by andrewl »

prophesi wrote: post #39

Bit of a sparse article. The near-miss of CVE funding is certainly tragic, but there's no mention of how they siphoned data from the NLRB and locked everyone out of their accounts, and give only a quick mention to cutting federal grants for cybersecurity and CISA's funding. There's a lot more ammo out there to show how incompetent the Trump administration and Musk's DOGE team actually is.

They're actually quite competent at their real goal, which is not to make America great, but to blow it to smithereens so various titanically rich people can buy everything up, including the land, at rock bottom prices.

Re: America's cyber defenses are being dismantled from the inside

#73

Post by alxlaz »

sofixa wrote: post #52
varjag wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Russia can barely handle a stalemate with Ukraine. See, people look at the stalemate and often draw false conclusions. It's not that Russia was too weak militarily, it's that Ukraine put up one hell of a fight. And all these economy size comparisons are mostly meaningless. Sure Russia may have a GDP of Italy but by the same logic Ukraine (which is a fraction of Russian GDP) should have lost long ago. > They have ze…

> See, people look at the stalemate and often draw false conclusions. It's not that Russia was too weak militarily, it's that Ukraine put up one hell of a fight While Ukraine unquestionably put up a hell of a fight, the fact that the numerically superior army with the better and more numerical equipment, backed by the multiple times bigger and richer country failed is a failure. Especially when you consider that Ukra…

> While Ukraine unquestionably put up a hell of a fight, the fact that the numerically superior army with the better and more numerical equipment, backed by the multiple times bigger and richer country failed is a failure. Especially when you consider that Ukraine doesn't have a navy and barely had an air force and anti-air, yet Russia failed at establishing air or naval control, let alone dominance.

That's certainly true, but much of this failure can be ascribed to:

1. Lack of co-ordination (both inter-force and within each unit) and basic best-practices in terms of logistics. The Russian armed forces are still far from anything NATO has in this regard but are also a lot better than when the war began.

2. Poor mobilisation and insufficient initial forces. Most of this was based on the obviously misguided notion that Russian forces would be welcome as liberators (which, haha, no, 40+ years of Soviet or Soviet-backed regimes in Eastern Europe have ensured this would not happen for generations), and is unlikely to be repeated.

3. Considerable strategic depth, which further compounded #1 and #2, which the Baltics don't have.

4. Considerable development of expertise on the Ukrainian side, which has been fighting in Donetsk and Luhansk since the first Russian invasion in 2014, whereas neither Poland nor the Baltics armed forces have had much exposure to real-life war outside the GWOT.

5. A smaller mismatch in terms of equipment than media coverage makes it sound, certainly far smaller than that of the Baltics.

The odds varjag puts forward aren't at all outlandish, especially with NATO commitment so uncertain at this time.

Re: America's cyber defenses are being dismantled from the inside

#74

Post by thinkingtoilet »

simpaticoder wrote: post #54
antonioevans wrote: post #13

So in what way does this help the American people?

>So in what way does this help the American people? Shutting down Mitre and the CVE is against American interests, both public and private. That said, you can make an argument, one that revolves around cost (was the CVE DB worth $50M a year, especially given its backlog?). The other part of that argument rests on assuming there will be a private or semi-private replacement for the service, that there may be many of t…

>$50M does seem like a lot

$50 seems like nothing for a trillion dollar government budget.

Re: America's cyber defenses are being dismantled from the inside

#76

Post by Suzuran »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #59
simpaticoder wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>So in what way does this help the American people? Shutting down Mitre and the CVE is against American interests, both public and private. That said, you can make an argument, one that revolves around cost (was the CVE DB worth $50M a year, especially given its backlog?). The other part of that argument rests on assuming there will be a private or semi-private replacement for the service, that there may be many of t…

You seem to be doing a cost/benefit analysis. The sense we have is that the people doing the dismantling either have not done such an analysis or are at the very least keeping it from the public.

They have absolutely done a cost/benefit analysis. It works like this: "If it does not benefit me personally, directly and financially, then it costs too much."

Re: America's cyber defenses are being dismantled from the inside

#77

Post by spamizbad »

antonioevans wrote: post #13

So in what way does this help the American people?

It doesn't. It's a side-effect of the populist right's "human capital" problem. Lots of nefarious theories abound about how this will be used to clamp down on our rights, and that may ultimately happen, but that will merely be a reaction to the consequences of their blundering actions. Today, the conventional wisdom among the Trump administration is these cybersecurity programs are a waste of money and that magically the private sector will swoop in and save us.

We're now all going to experience the high cost of low human capital.

Re: America's cyber defenses are being dismantled from the inside

#78

Post by watwut »

rjsw wrote: post #64
simpaticoder wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>So in what way does this help the American people? Shutting down Mitre and the CVE is against American interests, both public and private. That said, you can make an argument, one that revolves around cost (was the CVE DB worth $50M a year, especially given its backlog?). The other part of that argument rests on assuming there will be a private or semi-private replacement for the service, that there may be many of t…

NIST used to punch above its weight, everyone that I know who worked there has left over the last few months.

Did they left voluntarily or were let go?

Re: America's cyber defenses are being dismantled from the inside

#79

Post by ivan_gammel »

varjag wrote: post #47
sofixa wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unfortunately, Putin is likely going to keep invading up to Germany’s Fulda Gap Russia can barely handle a stalemate with Ukraine. They have zero chance offensively against Poland and the Baltics, let alone the full blown might of the EU+UK (which also have independent nuclear weapons in France and to an extent the UK). That doesn't mean that a Polish offensive can march into Moscow, but it doesn't have to for Puti…

> Russia can barely handle a stalemate with Ukraine. See, people look at the stalemate and often draw false conclusions. It's not that Russia was too weak militarily, it's that Ukraine put up one hell of a fight. And all these economy size comparisons are mostly meaningless. Sure Russia may have a GDP of Italy but by the same logic Ukraine (which is a fraction of Russian GDP) should have lost long ago. > They have ze…

>Russia's chances against the Baltics are pretty good, I would say 1 in 3. And for Putin it's a proposition with no downside: at worst he loses another few hundred thousand subjects.

Article 5 is still in effect, even if America won’t take its part. Attack of Baltics will trigger response from all neighbors including Finland, Sweden and Poland. Kaliningrad won’t last long, St.Petersburg will be within reach of artillery etc. It will be suicidal to do that.

One thing that Westerners do not understand is that people in small towns or rural areas of Russia may be expendable, but population of St.Petersburg and Moscow is a protected class. If they suffer, the regime may actually collapse before reaching military goals. For this reason Russian mobilization barely touched both capitals.

Re: America's cyber defenses are being dismantled from the inside

#80

Post by mfer »

antonioevans wrote: post #13

So in what way does this help the American people?

To play devils advocate here, a thought comes to mind...

Should the US be the one to handle the CVE database globally? The current administration wants to see other parts of the world help carry the load. A little scare could be the push needed to make this either distributed or handled by a coalition. This could be a positive for the US (who doesn't want to be the sole funder) and for those who don't want the US to have sole control.

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