Live data from Hacker News

America's cyber defenses are being dismantled from the inside

theregister.com

81–90 of 218 posts

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

#81
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would think that phrase is related to the phrase, “he who does not work, does not eat”, which is in the Bible: https://biblehub.com/2_thessalonians/3-10.htm The phrase “he who does not work, does not eat” was never intended by its author to be applied to those who were physically incapable of working. You might say otherwise, but Saint Paul had been a very traditional adherent of the Jewish faith, which had require…

I didn't know anyone was splitting hairs as to whether the phrase was to be applied to the helpless. Regardless, it always seems to be used as a cudgel against those whom the invoker believes is lazy or undeserving of God's help. (As an atheist though the phrase always seemed like a justification for why prayers were not being answered.)

[deleted]

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

#82

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…

> there will be a private or semi-private replacement for the service

It would, by definition as a for-profit entity, cost more and provide less value. That is a guarantee.

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

#83

So in what way does this help the American people?

It saves money on the government budget... or so they think. I doubt that there's anything sinister going on. It's just numbers in a government spreadsheet, and the Trump administration sees money going to projects that benefit people outside the US, regardless of their internal value, and just assumes that it's the US money spend on other nations. They are not smart enough, well informed enough, nor do they particul…

[flagged]

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

#84

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.

In my country such things are discussed in parliament during endless sessions about the yearly budget. They are not decreed by a god emperor at a whim.

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

#85
post #80

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…

As with many other cuts and activities by the administration, it’s not that some programs don’t deserve scrutiny, but that the cuts are careless and shortsighted.

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

#86

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…

Those who cause the crisis will show up soon to sell the solution, in the form of private ventures that make them a lot of money.

This mirrors a lot the physical destruction of other countries only to come back for "reconstruction" which filled some pockets with unimaginable amounts of money.

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

#87
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…

> it's that Ukraine put up one hell of a fight. I would like to add that, yes, with a lot of money and weapons from the US and other countries, they would not have been able to do it without their help. Am I wrong about the aid's significance, or did it not happen?

Yes, but the initial stopping of the Russian advance happened before the vast majority of that help arrived. In a way, Russia lost the war the moment it didn't finish it in a few days - it ensured Ukraine could be supplied, and that the resistance will be remembered and kept on.

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

#88

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…

>$50M does seem like a lot $50 seems like nothing for a trillion dollar government budget.

I almost edited my comment to anticipate this comment. It is not large compared to the budget. Nothing is. It's large in absolute terms. $50M is a lot of spend compared to most businesses with a similar scope. The product is a database of information other people report, naively it seems like a lot. It doesn't have any of the complexity of most businesses. This is not to minimize the work of fixing messy input, reproducing and properly cataloging vulnerabilities, etc. That budget is ~250 workers (assuming $100k/year with 100% overhead), ignoring infra. More than anything I'm curious how the money is being spent because without knowing that it's impossible to judge whether it's bloated or not.

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

#89

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.

https://www.npr.org/2025/04/15/nx-s1-5355896/doge-nlrb-elon-...

Goes into pretty good detail about DOGE employees going out of their way to obscure their activity on NLRB's Azure account. Surely a plus for transparency in government.

> Within minutes after DOGE accessed the NLRB's systems, someone with an IP address in Russia started trying to log in, according to Berulis' disclosure. The attempts were "near real-time," according to the disclosure. Those attempts were blocked, but they were especially alarming. Whoever was attempting to log in was using one of the newly created DOGE accounts — and the person had the correct username and password, according to Berulis.

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

#90
post #2

> It's the global catalog that helps everyone – security teams, software vendors, researchers, governments – organize and talk about vulnerabilities using the same reference system so why was only the US federal government funding it, especially if it wasn't expensive to maintain? this is the follow up question to every headline and won't be seen as controversial later, so why bother treating it as controversial to s…

Completely irrelevant. Deliberately or not you're repeating the Trump / DOGE talking point of government expense, focused on expenses that individually and in aggregate contribute practically nothing to the federal budget.

I agree wholeheartedly in this case. But gutting the epa will almost certainly boost the gdp far more than the amount directly saved. At least in the short term. Burning rivers are a lot harder to clean up than tech debt. I think the idea was to free up a bunch of labor to replace the perfectly good spigot of labor we had in the form of legal immigration, and get rid of a lot of regulations that inhibit short term gdp all in one swell foop. The tariffs were always primarily a negotiating strategy to get everyone to allow us to weaken the dollar, which unlike tariffs would outlast an administration and eventually bring manufacturing back for that freed up labor. In the interim there would be a ton of infrastructure spending to employ the labor as the lack is limiting our gdp by 1-2%. It was a decent plan except that long temr it ignored the environmental costs. The execution of the tariffs got screwed up though because while chaos is good for negotiation, it is not good in a sales pitch, which is essentially what this was. Let us weaken the dollar without responding and continuing to purchase bonds and we'll keep buying plent of your stuff, we have consumer demand to spare, and the gdp boost will offset the weakened dollar while making our bonds even safer as we begin to grow the gdp relative to the debt. The reason some allies like Australia and Canada got tariffs despite it not making any economic sense is different. In addition to sacrificing the environment, this plan sacrifices us democracy, and you can't have easy travel to a place with lots of individual freedom or you get the flight of all skilled labor like in Hungary.

Anyway, we are going to get the bad parts of the plan without the benefits now. Not entirely too late but pretty close. We can't all wait until a blatant constitutional crisis to start protesting because the court will back down where it can without openly loosing legitimacy. And once the admin chooses to cross the red line they will be ready for the response. Show support to gop members who want to stand up but are afraid of primaries (and death threats). Even promise cross party primary support where that is possible. Don't go along with illegal stuff. Tell the dnc your only priority is democracy and to stop arguing about the rest. Go to protests. Talk to people you disagree with calmly and do it a lot. Don't flee, this is endgame, nowhere else will hold out all that long. Help people get their voter registration in order with stuff like voterider to combat voter suppression.

Ok that was cathartic to type out all at once. If you don't see it then go read the history of successful and failed takeovers from rome to the present. It is a color by numbers approach that is easy to recognize once you've seen the others, but done super faster and with no visible bloodshed. And with a lot less public support than is normal for such things. Kind of impressive in a horrifying way.

Post reply on HN