[HN Gopher] Battlestar Galactica Lessons from Ransomware to the ...
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Battlestar Galactica Lessons from Ransomware to the Pandemic
Author : MaysonL
Score : 43 points
Date : 2021-05-13 16:28 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theinsight.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theinsight.org)
| wvenable wrote:
| What is currently driving corporate security practices is
| _insurance_. As attacks become more common and more devastating
| insurance becomes both more necessary and harder to get.
| Insurance companies are demanding ever greater audits and
| measures in order to get insured.
|
| The market is actually doing what it's supposed to in this case
| even if it is reactionary. All hope is not lost.
| mikestew wrote:
| In hindsight, I'm starting to think that fixing the Y2K bugs was
| a mistake. Or maybe we shouldn't have fixed _all_ of them. Let a
| few ATMs and electric plants shutdown, remind us what _could_
| have happened. As it is, we ended up complacent because nothing
| happened when those Chicken Littles said Y2K was going to cause
| problems.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| I've been reading her since her book "Twitter and Teargas" and I
| don't think there's a journalist alive today who synthesizes
| information across such a broad range and with such clarity and
| attention nuance as Zeynep.
| westondeboer wrote:
| One of my clients was hit with a ransomware attack on their
| website.
|
| It was a WordPress website, and I got an email that the website
| was down. I visited the website and saw the ransom, something
| something pay us in bitcoin.
|
| I had been using their backup services for a long time, so it
| took me three minutes to create a new server and import the data
| and the site was down for no longer than 10 minutes.
|
| I changed the users passwords and had virtually forgotten about
| it for a few weeks. When I was reminded about it a few weeks
| later, when a user asked why the password was changed.
|
| Does it cost too much to do backups?
| duped wrote:
| All of this has happened before, and will happen again.
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| The Cylons sent a humanoid sleeper agent to seduce the designer
| of their new intelligent battle software for their spaceships ,
| he gave her root access since she demonstrated remarkable coding
| skills (she was a Cylon) and she inserted the necessary
| backdoors.
| deeblering4 wrote:
| Indeed, I think the BSG analogy is a good sci-fi warning about
| the outcomes of moving away from heterogenous systems.
|
| Environments engineered with multiple failsafes, defense in
| depth, avoidance of SPOFs (including hardware models,
| manufacturers, chipsets, OSes, web servers, etc.) will be very
| difficult to fully penetrate and should be able to survive
| attacks.
|
| Of course none of the above is cheap or fast to do, so it
| usually doesn't get done.
| swiley wrote:
| Also on trusting binaries from external organizations.
| deeblering4 wrote:
| Agree although these days even curl|sh isn't far fetched
| gaius_baltar wrote:
| I'm very afraid of talking about this :)
| dkdbejwi383 wrote:
| BSG is just a very long argument in favour of PR reviews.
| not2b wrote:
| "Currently, only about one fourth of gas stations in North
| Carolina (where I am) are reporting that they have any gas." But
| this was mainly because of panic buying. The pipeline shutdown
| alone didn't suffice to cause the shortage.
| tpmx wrote:
| "Mainly because of panic buying". Is there a credible source on
| that?
|
| The average person has a pretty small abilility to store gas,
| even in NC.
| at_compile_time wrote:
| Supposing that the average person has half a tank of gas, is
| there enough supply for everyone to fill up on the same day?
| It doesn't seem unreasonable for the situation to be a
| combination of reduced supply and increased demand.
| tpmx wrote:
| The pipeline has been out of action for six days now,
| though.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonial_Pipeline_cyberattack
|
| _About 45% of all fuel consumed on the East Coast arrives
| via the pipeline system._
| wahern wrote:
| According to Wikipedia the system has significant buffer
| capacity:
|
| > Fifteen associated tank farms... provide a 45-day
| supply for local communities.
|
| Such buffer capacity makes sense considering how long
| deliveries actually take:
|
| > It generally takes from 14 to 24 days for a batch to
| get from Houston, Texas to the New York harbor, with 18.5
| days the average time.
|
| Also consider where the shortages are occurring: in
| sprawling, rural and exurban areas where the last-mile
| infrastructure is likely exceptionally thin; that is,
| much less able to handle surges. It's not just computer
| and car manufacturers that optimize for "on-demand
| inventory"--i.e. cut carry costs to the bone, sacrificing
| volatility resilience.
| smbv wrote:
| Link without tracking tokens:
|
| https://www.theinsight.org/p/battlestar-galactica-lessons-fr...
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(page generated 2021-05-13 23:02 UTC)