If the claim is true, I'd expect them to have used either those models or Grok or similar.
Of course if I was the FBI, I would make it so hackers trying to breach the system get a honeypot where all the data is fake, and with LLMs (even poor ones) it would be very easy to fake an entire alternative reality.
How about putting some cash bounty flags out there in dedicated mock systems.. and maybe allow the public to attempt cyber breaches with the same impunity that anonymous perpetrators enjoy.
If your systems are compromised and need to coordinate, what do you even do if you can't trust anything, assuming the attacker is still inside the network.
If the goal is to exfiltrate data, I guess it is. If the goal is to make the people working in the FBI feel vulnerable - and pushing out this sample data would suggest that it is - I don't think it is. You could probably do the same with data from social media sites and data brokers.
> If your systems are compromised and need to coordinate, what do you even do if you can't trust anything, assuming the attacker is still inside the network?
That's a problem regular companies need to write up a plan for (but most of them probably don't put too much effort into it).
Even with the descend into incompetence the USA has been pulling for the past few years, I still expect the FBI to have a plan for exactly that sort of compromise.
There's incompetence in every major company including Oracle. PeopleSoft isn't known for being the most modern or secure thing out there. Less reliance on 3rd party software like this will be a good thing going forward.
Anyone that signed an Oracle contract has volunteered as a hostage, though, so you have to negotiate with both the hostage-taker and the hostages. Stockholm-syndrome-esque.
The irony, of course, is that this will likely have a negative impact upon Oracle's reputation, which will have a negative impact upon its value, which will then be resolved with more RIFs.
I doubt it, look at all other breaches over the years.
If anything Oracle will "contribute" a lot to congress people's midterm reelection and in a few months all will be forgotten and Oracle will get more Gov. contracts.
My absolute favorite Trump imbecility, and there are so so so so so (so)^inf many Trump imbecilities. He’s almost impossibly dumb, just like his voters.
FBI in this past year has been desperate for hires. To the point they have ran campaigns to do 1 interview to hire. I've had a few recruitment calls to interview for positions but their pay is far below market rate for cybersecurity professionals. To the tune of like 30-50k/yr below what you could get elsewhere for analyst work. Add that in with the horrible reputation they have now, it's a grim situation.
> pay is far below market rate for cybersecurity professionals. T
And there is no glamour on sense of duty when your main job is to make sure that the Epstein files are not revealed so USA citizens are in the dark about who were the rapists and criminals in the list. An awful job.
The attackers exfil'd 3TB of data, which obviously included PII, from AWS servers. They should've had DLP, active monitoring, countermeasures, using a security vendor (you can set this up for AWS services using CloudTrail, CloudWatch Logs, etc). You're supposed to have that for sensitive government or military work, and it should have (at least) caught that much traffic going to a rando external IP, blocked and flagged.
If they did have it set up, then somebody wasn't doing their job. If they didn't have it set up, they didn't comply (which is also not doing their job). I see this all the time. The security analysts send tickets to people when they see major issues and nobody is held accountable for inaction. Management asleep at the wheel (which is also their cover, can't be blamed for what you made sure you never knew about).
The FBI had some very smart people. The current regime/administration's number 1 priority is to eliminate anyone competent in order to replace them with loyalists. Stuff is only going to get worse.
If it was compressed prior to exfiltration it would be much smaller than the original data. I would expect this is mostly human readable text and a fairly high compression ratio. Agree it would still be large but 2 TB at 7:1 ratio drops to 285 GB. I don't know how much these servers are doing with data but I'd suspect sneaking out 10 GB/day over a month or 20GB/day over 2 weeks isn't going to trip up much. The CPU hog for the original compression might, but if you batch out the process in chunks (like a good data engineer), you probably wont trip many thresholds outside of expected use. Just a theory on how I might sneak that much data out of somewhere that has eyes on it, I don't know many details except what's in the article.
Na, they just linked it up to the VLAN that carries the netflix traffic and no one noticed because it wasn't even a drop.
Now, I made that totally up, but this is how things go. They'll watch one area like a hawk only to leave another glaringly wide door open.
What is even worse is there are a lot of horrifically inefficient apps out there calling way too much data for no reason and suddenly a hack of an entire database gets lost as noise in relation to all the traffic on the servers and networks.
Anomaly detection is getting better. A small delta can still trigger it. Wether a human reviewed it is another story. But the post mortem will reveal all the signs in hindsight.
There’s a scene in Battlestar Galactica (2004) where someone asks Captain Adama why the Galactica doesn’t have networked computers. So the cylons can’t hack the ship…
I think it's one of the first two special episodes right at the beginning of the series, and it's the sole reason why the fleet could sustain evading the cylons
It's not just a scene; it's the whole premise of the setting. It's why the Galactica survived and the newer ships did not. It's why the new Vipers got wiped out and they had to pull the old ones out of mothballs.
In the pilot, the Galactica was literally being turned into a museum, and that's why they lived.
No, GP is correct. In the pilot, the ship was in the process of being decommissioned from military use and converted to a museum. It wasn't already a museum prior to the events in the pilot.
Firefly…didn’t age well. A buddy said that to me and I scoffed. Rewatched a few years ago and kind of regret it.
Some individual moments/episodes are still great but most of it is very cringe inducing and/or didn’t age well as a “joke.” Knowing what we know about Adam Baldwin (and Whedon frankly but Baldwin is a special kind of gross) doesn’t help either.
I somehow just recently discovered the whole series - and I did enjoy it, but yes, not because, but despite the main character being a "narcissistic asshole" most of the time. But it probably also helped that I did not took it too serious, nor do I know anything about Baldwin.
I get not taking things seriously but the show does ultimately take itself pretty seriously. Whedon just can’t let emotional beats breathe and breaks them up with wisecracks lol
Baldwin…well, he was one of the reasons gamergate became a thing, which is by itself bad enough but also hardly his only offense. He’s pretty awful. So knowing his “manosphere” proximity makes his act a little too real, like Spacey with American Beauty.
Shame too. Hero of canton (is that the episode name?) was pretty memorable and has a beautiful ending.
Stargate is just one of those rare shows that (apart from, uh, certain episodes) aged incredibly well. I really miss optimistic television where people are competent at their jobs.
Even the whole "science person solves the problem under pressure after getting an insight" thing suddenly seems a lot more realistic now that LLMs have actually become good.
Which was always pretty stupid. At best it means the Cylons can't hack the whole ship, just whichever part they exploited to gain access remotely in the first place. But really the Cylons would've needed exploits for each individual system anyway, since simply connecting them with wires shouldn't just do that. And unless those other systems are completely air gapped with no wireless or other access, it would be trivial for them to still gain remote access, or have one of their infiltrators provide a local connection of some kind. AFAIR that was never a plot point, which was odd.
Sometimes I wonder if filmmakers have the right of it. They need to show what's going on in the computer to a distracted audience in a heartbeat. When they pull that off on screen, I wonder if us software devs should be taking notes.
Isn't that what dashboards are for? They may not look like simplistic LEDs, but being able to "see" what the automation is doing is something everyone that's ever made automation wants to do. It starts with making logs before migrating to live dashboards.
Its basically that staring at the log patterns in graph form or system stats you get a pretty good idea of what 'normal' looks like and anomalies stick out pretty quickly.
Though having a person interpretingthe degradation progress and relaying it to the rest of the team could be a usable scene.
A guy I went to high school with used to do that for a living. I have no idea what they call it, but it's basically theatrical UI, where the screen has to act and usually deliver a bunch of exposition.
I can't recall where I saw it, there's at least one company working on this issue specifically for nursing staff. Everything beeps in hospitals, but there's no rhyme or reason to it, so room call responses are delayed, serious alarms can be missed, etc.
IIRC, the company's idea is to create a harmonious sound bed when everything's fine, and make different kinds of "out of the norm" alerts use a variety of sounds so that nursing staff get more info about what's wrong before finding the thing thats sounding an alert and looking at its screen.
This company's goal is to ... change an aspect of hundreds of different million-dollar highly regulated machines made by dozens of different multi-billion-dollar worldwide companies? And somehow make money doing this? Good luck, I guess.
Could this be resolved with a capacitor? LED can stay on for at least a second or two once the camera is off? Not sure on exact components but this feels solvable and only problem may be slim design of their laptops.
Hmm ShinyHunters seems to be in the news quite a bit recently. Most high profile was the Canvas LMS hack last spring right during college finals. Wonder if there will be a ransom for this data as well.
If I use Claude or OpenAI swarm to commit crimes, and the vendor knows I'm up to no good, what's their liability? Do they plan to invoke the phone company defense?
At this point, no one seems capable of keeping a large database safe. I assume all medical and biographical information that exists is in the hands of the major state actors.
China hacked 22.1 million records of US government employees:
And the city wonders why I don't want to put my credit card info in their crappy parking app and would instead prefer to put a quarter into the meter for 30 mins.
Yeah, about the medical information. Recently in Poland there was a hack on the medical system called MyDr that is used by commercial medical facilities.
Estimated 21M people could've been affected.
So it is already happening and the scariest thing is, we don't have control on where our data is stored on. Even the EU GDPR didn't make it easy to control what data lands where.
It is unthinkable to me that anyone believes there is such a thing as computer security after so many years of nonstop hacks and leaks. If you have a computer and it is connected to a network with access to the Internet, assume that computer is semi-public. Meaning, if someone was interested enough in accessing your computer, they could do it. Do not hook any computer with access to anything that would be devastating if it was made public to the Internet. Do not put anything that would be devastating if it was made public onto someone else's Internet-connected computers.
For example, do not hook your goddamn water or traffic or electricity infrastructure up to the goddamn Internet, and then, do fire the guy who suggested it.
The correct analogy for computer security is not locks and keys and doors and gates. It is a house in a floodplain. Your house will not survive the flood of it hits you. Do not store anything critical or irreplaceable in that house.
It used to be that nothing was secure but that was OK because at least adversaries would have to expend effort. If you are one of a million companies why would anyone hack you. Maybe if you are a target you need a lot of investment, but most orgs only prevent the most egregious of vulnerabilities.
The calculus has certainly changed. Hacking is becoming even more frequent and… I’m not really sure what the equilibrium looks like.
It’s not really an option to stop using computers or networks. But it’s going to be way too expensive (or maybe even impossible) to secure even just critical systems.
Maybe banks and governments can secure themselves (and that’s a big IF) but it really feels like something fundamentally has to change.
Ah yes, the parable of the bear. There are a million people stuck in a valley and two bears. You do not need to outrun the bears, you just need to outrun at least two other people. But it turns out one of those bears is male and the other is female. So next year there are more bears, but you still just need to outrun a few people. Then one day, there are 1 million bears and they eat you all. Very inspiring story.
Software security has just been a fun time of ignoring the exponentially growing number of bears for the last few decades so you can continue to use systems unfit for the threat landscape because they are cheap.
> Maybe banks and governments can secure themselves (and that’s a big IF) but it really feels like something fundamentally has to change.
The problem is that most companies don't care if they get hacked so long as the hackers are just taking data and not interfering in their ability to bill customers and make money.
They face zero meaningful consequences if their data gets leaked. The money they save by not taking security and employee/customer privacy seriously will more than pay for the year of "identity protection" they'd have to pay for (assuming the hack gets found out) anyway.
They actually care about ransomware, but most of the time that's also something they can comfortably buy their way out of. We've seen a lot of companies pay off ransomware gangs rather than invest in the kinds of robust backups that would make recovery possible/less painful than rewarding the hackers.
What's needed for change is regulation with actual teeth that makes not protecting their data either meaningfully expensive or criminal resulting in executives spending time behind bars for their negligence. Without that, things are only going to get worse, especially as companies experiment with using AI and increase dependence on third parties and cloud providers who themselves become rich targets.
That probably still won't help the FBI though. Our government isn't exactly big on holding themselves accountable or even prioritizing competency right now.
>We've seen a lot of companies pay off ransomware gangs rather than invest in the kinds of robust backups that would make recovery possible/less painful than rewarding the hackers.
Experienced Ransomware gangs will set the price target as something high, but not cost more than the price of being down a few days while you rebuild, making paying them seem like the most cost-effective solution
We will tolerate it. Companies will make robust identity verification schemes to enable agentic commerce. And it helps reverse hacking, making it a no-brainer.
Let's say my cryptosig gets hacked by SkyNet, or my agent goes rogue. Either way someone files a million loan applications in my name! Normally my agent uses that to buy $200/month of Funko pops, or negotiate my recent purchase of a used car.
I get the notification from my cryptosig company. I freak out, report as fraud, and wait.
They comp the $3000 advance on my loan the scammer managed to withdraw, and I get off scott free, changing nothing about my behaviour.
If cryptosigs meant I liable for someone stealing my identity like in 2026, I wouldn't use it. I'd negotiate everything myself with document scans, or god-forbid go in person since only I can legally bind myself under my own name.
That sucks! Nobody gets a commission when I make deals with a government ID. Startups don't even allow it as cryptosigs are more secure than scanned passports.
I don't want to do that. When I was 18, I got swindled by a human salesperson into a $1400/month 27% APR muacle car when human soldiers got signing bonuses.
When I let AI own the budget, it leased me a mostly depreciated BMW for $500/month.
I was so grateful that I selected a 40% tip for the AI. I wouldn't want to make things awkward with the companion I spend 8 hours a day talking to, after all. To avoid a conflict of interest she only accepts voluntary fees.
There is such a thing, or, rather, used to be. Problem is that security is expensive (essentially one needs to examine all possible states of the system), and it inevitably failed to keep up with the crazy growth of complexity of modern computer systems. It became impossible to maintain a model of a system with myriad of moving parts, so it became impossible to make behavior guarantees.
Remove the complexity (all the way down to the hardware quirks), and security will be doable again.
Many years ago, I regularly played cyberpunk tabletop RPGs with a number of other computer-inclined friends. We all used to laugh at ridiculousness of a key assumption of the game - the idea that giant corporations would ever connect their internal networks, full of valuable data, to the larger global telecommunications network.
This. I have an OpenStack homelab and a fast home internet connection. I update things pretty much daily, apply best practices, etc. And despite that outside of a wire guard instance i still host public things on a pair of VPSes, security just moves too fast to risk the home network (important things are backed up remotely and all that). I try to update the VPSes daily. Haven't gotten popped yet (to my knowledge!), but I am sure it'll happen eventually.
> It is unthinkable to me that anyone believes there is such a thing as computer security after so many years of nonstop hacks and leaks.
Of course there is. For example, SeL4’s security and reliability proofs still hold in the world of LLMs. The problem is that most software isn’t written on that firm foundation. Instead, most software is made by people with the philosophy of “if it looks like it works, ship it”. You don’t get secure software by working like that, because security vulnerabilities aren’t visible.
We - humans - know how to write secure software. Just like we know how to make safe aeroplanes. The problem isn’t that we lack the capability to make secure computers. The problem is we don’t have a culture of security. Secure software is - somehow - niche. And as such, it’s much more expensive. And nobody wants to pay.
The bank has the best doors, the best locks, and the best cameras, and it is patrolled by a guard who props the doors open to so he doesn't have to keep fooling with the locks and points the cameras the other way to extend his smoke break. SeL4 would be another system used by humans.
It's always possible to break a perfect system by moving an additional layer of abstraction outward, and attacking one of the assumptions upon which it's built. Some of our era's highest security systems - game consoles - have been broken by undervolting them until the logic failed.
It's often possible. But not all systems are vulnerable to undervoltage attacks. For example, I don't think the iphone secure enclave is vulnerable to this.
And good security uses "defence in depth". Multiple layers which each individually need to be compromised to break the whole thing. To hack chrome, you need a vulnerability in the renderer or VM. Then you also need a sandbox escape, and a way to use that to attack the browser's parent process. This is much harder to do.
> not all systems are vulnerable to undervoltage attacks. For example, I don't think the iphone secure enclave is vulnerable to this.
Then there's decapping / depotting, a world of different types of microscopy - some destructive some not, directed EM attacks, etc.
> And good security uses "defence in depth"
And automation has enabled "offense in depth"
> To hack chrome, you need a vulnerability in the renderer or VM. Then you also need a sandbox escape, and a way to use that to attack the browser's parent process.
Or you just phish the user into installing your exploit. There's always another layer. Always a potential exploit. Because ultimately the same properties of the universe which permit computation within a closed system allow for predictably observing and influencing it. The expense and hassle of doing so are widely variable, of course.
> There's always another layer. Always a potential exploit.
So what? Most attackers aren't nation state adversaries. They're some kid in Wyoming messing around with deepseek. We live in a world where most exploits happen because someone was running an unpatched, 8 year old copy of wordpress. Because they put their insecure mongodb instance on the open internet. Because they used admin / "12345" as the username and password. We don't need to make hacks physically impossible for a nation state adversary. Just really, really difficult and expensive to pull off.
Honestly. If people talked about physical security like they talk about computer security, you'd have people telling you that, because walls can be physically smashed through, they don't bother locking the front door to their house.
> Honestly. If people talked about physical security like they talk about computer security, you'd have people telling you that, because walls can be physically smashed through, they don't bother locking the front door to their house.
Sure, but also if there are a dozen bikes locked to the rack all costing $1000 and a $500 bike just sitting there completely unlocked, the average thief is probably gonna take the cheaper unlocked one and ride away.
It’s not hard to get into a garage but it’s really easy to steal a lawnmower if you leave the door open all night. I wouldn’t call that thief honest but even the minor deterrent of closing the garage was enough to make you not the target.
How many locked doors have easily breakable glass windows right next to them, nevermind breakable walls? What we need is a red-team waiver, and an AI model, and a budget, and say something like: your site has to be unhacked by the HackerAI3000 bot after 2 days on a 5090 Nvidia GPU.
I'd stick with always. Defense vs offense in anything reasonably complex suffers from one issue that simply cannot be overcome. To defend, you need to defend against every single possible imaginable attack, from now until forever. To attack, you need to find a single attack that works. And on a practical level all systems need to be accessible by somebody, yet that somebody is himself also now a part of your security structure and is never going to be 100% reliable, both in terms of corruption and incompetence.
I once worked on AUD 450M banking project, the root password was kept in a kickstart file and unchanged, root SSH was allowed. The bank didn't care until I told the external security auditor who included it as part of their report.
By the way, there are countless ways to account for humans. There are entire branches of engineering devoted to this. If you don't want someone to leave the bank with a pen customers use for signing checks, you just chain it to the desk. If you don't want the installer to forget to put the pen-chain in, make a photo of the chain part of the checklist required to get paid. If you want to... etc.
The idea is that you determine an acceptable level of risk, then secure to that level. Maybe the acceptable level of risk chosen by companies is wrong. Maybe we need to increase that risk exposure via heavier fines and regulations. Maybe the cost of reducing that risk is too high already. Maybe we need to fund that. Maybe it's too confusing and we need to research better standard practices. I dunno. But this is not some unsolvable problem.
Ask anyone seriously involved in security - whether computer science related, or in general.
A thought experiment:
Think about the most important secrets a country can have - now think how they are still discovered by competing countries, enemies, etc.
As long as there are humans in the loop there is a known weakness.
We know about many famous cases of leaks - like the USSR stealing notes from the manhatten project. But I bet there are thousands of secrets which remain secret. We just don't actually know about them, because, y'know, they're kept secret.
This simply isn’t the case. There are plenty of secrets that every military keeps just fine. See how long we’ve gone without anyone ripping off the F-22? That’s not even a new airframe anymore.
This is EXACTLY what I was talking about. The tech that makes the F-22 an unmitigated terror of the skies is of utmost importance, so it’s still kept secret. The barriers around that information are obnoxious, but effective. What blood type a subsection of your military has is of much less importance. That’s why that data was stolen (See: OPM hack) and our best weapons remain secret.
Decades ago, I worked in a bank in an old building. The door had a card reader for access. You boop your card and the door opened. People would hold the door open for each other all the time out of politeness, even when they didn't know each other. Security told us not to do that, but it's hard to convince people to stop being polite.
I had a laptop stolen from my desk in a place like that once. (Not a bank - but similar door-card reader system). This guy came in in the middle of the day, wearing overalls. He confidently walked through the door after someone, like he belonged there. He walked up to my desk, swiped my laptop and just strolled out.
At the bank, they've replaced the door with mechanical gates and a security guard. The gates - physically - only let one person to walk through at a time. You can't hold a gate open any more. And the security guards stop anyone who tries.
Is it 100% foolproof? No. But it's way more secure. It would have stopped that laptop thief.
There's this pernicious, defeatist attitude that if you can't make a system 100% secure, so you shouldn't try. That's misguided. Most systems can be made orders of magnitude more secure than they are today. It just takes a bit of care and work.
Fine. Make the universe work for it. The whole system becomes more resilient as a result.
Look at our immune system. Incredibly complex and clever, and able to keep us alive in the face of all sorts of pathogens. It exists because of this cat and mouse game, played over millions of years.
There's people in the highlands of PNG who regularly eat each other. Of course, many are thought to have died due to prion diseases. But now these tribespeople seem to have become largely immune to prion disease. Incredible.
What seems obvious to you doesn't seem obvious to me. I'm not a malicious or incompetent enemy. But you will need to explain your perspective for me to understand it.
No because it's a problem of human communication. Taking humans out of the loop creates other social problems that have been thoroughly documented in cyberpunk mythology, not actual a solution, just trading one big problem with multiple little ones.
Guess you don’t remember the days of ssl on login pages, ssl strip, exfiltering data via JavaScript prototype pollution, and a million other things like that.
Only just when we started to have a resemblance of security we got agile and startups breaking things (making rubbish software to capture a few bucks faster) and now vibe coding and llm assisted hacking.
The point of my, arguably rant, is that there is nothing new under the sun.
It should. We went through couple of cycles of "things are bad, inmates are running the asylum" before, and nothing of consequence happened. The world still goes on.
It's not a guarantee this time will be the same - but it should temper the worry somewhat.
I thought security clearances are a dime a dozen, and "all FBI employees" list is full of administrative work and basically 80% mirrored on LinkedIn? (Yes, the remaining 20% - or however much - leaking is a problem.)
Nothing new under the sun, it's the banality of evil all over again my dude. We never left scary waters, but they do seem to be growing calmer. Is this the storm before the storm?
I believe the technical term is “Move fast, and break things.” MVP is a huge disaster. I can see it working for applications that don’t process PID, but only an idiot ships data handling software before it’s been dragged through a lot of testing. I tested my app for two years, before shipping, and an LLM still found a couple of holes (minor ones, but ones I missed).
After the DOGE debacle, I suspect that all the previously really secure stuff, is now out there, too. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if some of these leaks, came from that.
The issue is that in consumer and enterprise software, move fast-and-break-things outcompetes secure-by-default every time. Critical infrastructure needs to have a different set of priorities, but it’s very hard because the expertise is so thin on the ground. Why would anyone with the expertise to make these calls bang their head against the wall trying to educate bureaucrats about these things for $150k a year when they can easily make multiples of that in big software companies that don’t own that level of risk.
The incentives have to change. Any breach regarding PID should have fines as a percentage of revenue of the company. Any breach intentionally covered up and found out later by a third party should mean jail time for the C level. Yes, I know it is hard to make such laws "foolproof". And yes, in the current political and economical climate it will not happen anyway.
The real problem is that even for companies that wish to pay more and wait more for secure-by-default can't easily tell the difference.
The only solution I can come up with is some form of certification or paid code review from a third party. I know that at least for Windows prior to 7 Microsoft actually allowed some parties to come in and check the code/checksum on an air-gaped computer. We somehow moved to "trust more" in the last decade, and now we can trust nobody
I've yet to see any form of certification or paid code review I'd be willing to bet critical infrastructure on. And working in safety critical software, that's not for lack of trying. Good review is usually harder than building a working system and the asymmetry of offense and defense applies to anything you miss.
Not really. It’s likely that the dumped (and compromised) data might contain things like keys and URLs that could be used to pry open other sites. Blackhats have become really good at following breadcrumb trails, and using “innocuous” clues to ascertain much more dangerous access.
LLMs have been a huge force multiplier. Here.
If that data got out (which probably happened within hours of the data being dumped to insecure storage), then it’s probably already been analyzed and used to leverage access.
It's not as if best practices aren't well documented, or as if CVEs don't come out every day, or as if the information is somehow unavailable to even the most junior devs to take basic security measures.
Not all hacks are caused by pure negligence, laziness or stupidity, but most of them are. Even a little effort goes a long way.
My grandfather spent a couple decades as a builder, ran a construction crew. Whatever the project was, he wanted to know everyone he hired personally was going to reinforce and report to him anything they had the slightest doubt about. "Always hammer in an extra nail" was basically his motto.
What we do ain't that different. The difference is that when an apartment building collapses, it's bigger news than when a govenrment database does.
The incentives from society are all about it. What company has ever faced serious consequences for hacks or data leaks? A cheap fine is just an unlucky cost of business.
I'd argue the management has a point there; without a pressure to ship, nothing would ever get released, because computer security has not yet understood the basic concepts that every non-computer security work does:
- nothing is, can be, or even should be 100% secure;
- security is a trade-off against costs and usability, and those two other factors are more important - if "properly secured" product/service cannot fulfill its function anymore, then you may just as well not make it;
- security isn't done in isolation from other systems and the world at large; "if this happens we'll go straight to filing crime report with the police" is perfectly legitimate security measure (even if it works somewhat less well on the Internet)
As much as you're right, the attitude in most software development is not "lets make this as secure as reasonable," it is "lets make this barely functional and then move onto the next thing."
This is all fine and good and the sorts of conversations we were having on tradeoffs like any other engineering org. Theres always been pressure to ship, but now its that various pockets of AI Believers have popped up, egged on by a manic management, containing such beliefs that the code no longer matters, that it’s possible to move fast and fix it up later, human review isn’t important anymore, and that lines of code is a valuable metric.
Those running projects with these beliefs are sputtering and producing impressive PoCs that struggle to make it into production - either through underestimating the amount of detail needed to scale, or often throwing away good practices in favor of letting LLMs handle tradeoffs that later blow up.
Theres plenty of good ways to utilize LLMs to speed things up, but so many teams got so incentivized by management to move fast at any cost that they’ve thrown out “load-bearing” good practices for software. That bet hasn't been paying off the way they’d hoped. It’s now clear that they thought they’d be able to massively downsize the engineering orgs. Massive token spend is giving very little RoI and now like other companies they’re trying to rein in the biggest spenders who are often not producing value.
<< And as such, it’s much more expensive. And nobody wants to pay.
Eh. If only it was that simple. I mean, yes, money is always a factor, but not nearly as big of a factor as 'my convenience outweighs pretty much everything ( until it causes sufficient amount of havoc.. and even then.. )'. You can see it in just about everything. It is not just the money. It is the convenience that drives most of the unsecure behavior.
> The problem isn’t that we lack the capability to make secure computers.
Depends on the "we". "We" have the capability to make secure computers like how "we" have the capability to make EUV lithography machines. There exists a relatively small number of people and organizations in the world who can do so. Microsoft does not have that capability. Google does not have that capability. Linux does not have that capability. Amazon does not have that capability. Apple does not have that capability. Cisco does not have that capability. IBM does not have that capability. etc. All of those organizations have tried for literal decades, thumped their chests about how they have awesome security year after year, and yet have totally and utterly failed despite their best efforts.
Acquiring the capability to do so is difficult and challenging and requires years to invent if you start right this very second and know what you need to do, which these organizations emphatically do not. We need security at scale and fast. The only way forward is to scale up working solutions rather than letting the bozos who put us in this spot fail at scale with yet another promise that this time for sure they will solve the problem they have repeatedly failed at for decades.
> Microsoft does not have that capability. Google does not have that capability. Linux does not have that capability. Amazon does not have that capability. Apple does not have that capability. Cisco does not have that capability. IBM does not have that capability. etc
This is all by choice. They could easily have that capsbility, very unlike EUV.
Part of the argument (aiui) is that there is no way that culture could ever change to producing secure systems. There are too many weaknesses embedded in the organizational structure.
Yeah, just like a lot of organizational change, one approach would probably be to put together a small Skunkworks-type team to nail it on one specific product. Existence proofs have, in my experience, a pretty powerful effect on the naysayers.
Oh, Microsoft can just figure out how to make unhackable systems, they just choose not to. They spend all of those billions of dollars per year on security and spent all of those decades on failed attempts as a prank.
You really think that if they could have they would not have, even just for bragging rights? Or are we going with that it is some kind of task demanding enormous expenditure even though the organizations that have made secure systems are infinitesimally small in comparison?
Microsoft has spent orders of magnitude more money and time than the organizations that have succeeded and the result of their efforts is Windows. That says everything you need to know about their capabilitys.
If windows was reimplemented as a capability based microkernel like sel4, it would be far more secure. Run drivers in their own isolated processes. Do interprocess communication between them via capabilities and shared memory. Remove all ambient authority from programs. All the programs a user launches stop automatically inheriting all of that user's permissions.
There's no secret knowledge required to do this. The SeL4 team has written extensive documentation of how they did it. They also opensourced their kernel implementation, with correctness proofs for the whole thing.
The reason windows hasn't done it is the cost. You'd have to rewrite half of the NT kernel and refactor everything else. All existing windows drivers would need to be rewritten. If you forced windows userland use a capability based system, you'd essentially be inventing a new way to write windows programs. You'd need to document that, and write a compatibility layer for legacy programs. And solve some UX problems. It would be terribly inconvenient for everyone. Oh, and some programs would run slower as a result.
They could do it if they wanted to. But microsoft just doesn't care about security as much as they care about performance and compatibility. Linux is the same.
Your knowledge is far out of date: Windows already supports capabilities and does run a lot drivers in isolated processes, along with most OS services. It has done for years. It has the most sophisticated IPC framework of any OS (DCOM) which is integrated with the operating system kernel's security frameworks, and used pervasively both internally and by apps. And Microsoft has created a new way to write Windows programs in which apps are expected to advertise the capabilities they need (see WinRT and MSIX). This is also over 15 years old.
macOS does the same but with more developer adoption. Apps don't have the ambient capabilities of the user and must advertise what they need via entitlements embedded in the binaries, or get permission just in time.
"Capabilities" are academic overpromises. This article I wrote is more about language/runtime level capabilities but OS capabilities are not much better.
SeL4 isn't secure because of One Weird Trick that others would adopt if only if they could be made to care enough, it's "secure" because it hardly does anything, which is why nobody uses it and why it has no impact on computer security.
The hard part of desktop security is not changing the operating system. The hard part is getting app developers to care. Most security features added to operating systems are ignored by developers, which is why Apple forces you to adopt some of them as the price of admission to the app store. If they didn't nobody would use them, as can be seen for apps distributed outside of the app store. The reason is security is a market for lemons. Nobody can see the result of security investments so it's irrational to invest. SeL4 has no solution.
> Your knowledge is out of date: Windows has supported capabilities from the start of NT and does run a lot drivers in isolated processes, along with most OS services.
Thanks! I quickly googled this point before posting earlier to make sure I was still right. Gemini helpfully told me that yes indeed, drivers in windows run in the kernel's main process. Thanks, AI.
> This article I wrote is more about language/runtime level capabilities but OS capabilities are not much better.
I think I responded to this article at the time. I still find this article somewhat confusing and unconvincing. For example, you conflate Java's SecurityManager with capability systems, even though it seems more like an permission based access control system. Then you point out many of its weaknesses. To what end? What conclusion about capability systems am I supposed to draw from a criticism of this quite different security model?
A capability is not a permission flag. Unlike your example, a good capability system would generally pass all HTTP requests to a given endpoint through a single capability object. You wouldn't need different caps for each HTTP method like SecurityManager apparently requires. It's like file handles. You don't create several different file handles to interact with the same file, one for reading, one for writing and so on. We just open the file once, with whatever options are needed. Then the file descriptor can be passed into any function which needs to access that file. Whoever recieves the file doesn't know if they're talking to an actual file, or some in-memory object or something else.
You also say this:
> File descriptors are a kind of capability provided by the kernel, but a rather odd and inflexible kind. They aren’t a great example of object capabilities.
Huh? File descriptors are often treated as the canonical example of object capabilities. This comment makes me wonder if we're even talking about the same thing. At the risk of being indelicate, are you sure you know what capabilities are?
The point about god objects lands. I also agree that trying to retrofit a language like java to make modules unable to share memory is difficult. But lots of aspects of language design works like this. Consider garbage collectors. Before GC languages existed, I could write the same article talking about the difficulties of hacking a GC into C. But that wouldn't teach me anything about how well the GC works in a language like Java.
Anyway, the main advantage of capabilities is the ability to split programs out into sub-modules such that a compromise or bug in one part of the system doesn't lead to a failure of the entire system. We can talk about whether bringing this into the language itself is a good idea or not. But I feel pretty confident that its a good idea, helping with security and reliability. We can look at Chrome, SeL4, Erlang and - apparently - windows for examples. Even if they don't all think of it as a capability based problem.
The SecurityManager exists in complement with Java capabilities. You could, in theory, use the Java language with a different standard library and implement a pure object capability system, as the language rules allow for that (if you disable reflection). But it would have bad ergonomics and still end up with a SecurityManager equivalent because a DSL for permissions is more convenient than doing it all in code.
Consider the most common task the SecurityManager was deployed for: stopping plugins calling System.exit() by accident. One might say, the right to exit the process should be an object capability. OK. But then where does that object come from? Java programs start at main() and it doesn't receive an object.
You'd need a new design where you pass in a god object to main(), which in turn has properties giving access to a ProcessExiter interface or something similar, and then any code that genuinely needs to exit the process would need to request it in the function arguments, threading it down the stack. You'd get an explosion of types. A simple permissions DSL is much easier to write and reason about, and it gets out of the way when you don't want sandboxing.
Why would you want all HTTP requests to flow through a single capability object? I think it's pretty common to want to let code do GETs but not POSTs. You end up wanting pretty fine grained permissions in a lot of real scenarios.
File descriptors are poor object capabilities because the interface they implement is fixed by the OS, except then there's a weird ioctl escape hatch that isn't properly typed, reflectable, wrappable or interposable. To see what can go wrong with this, consider a recent fix to the Codex sandbox on macOS:
The sandbox forbids writing to a file descriptor except, oops, someone at Apple forgot about the F_TRANSFEREXTENTS ioctl which is still allowed on a read only fd. It should be possible to do what is expected here and just pass in a read only fd where all you can do is call read() and maybe seek(), or perhaps pass in an fd where a specific ioctl is the only thing you can do, but POSIX has no concept of this.
A good example of an object capability system would be Mojo, which I describe in the essay. You can create objects representing capabilities and pass them between sandboxes, in an unforgeable way.
We live in a golden era of prototyping so if you wanted to make a language where everything is a capability passed into main(), you could. The code doesn't have to be executable, you could just mock out some realistic programs and see how the code feels. My guess is you'd need a lot of language features to hide the explicit object capabilities away for ergonomic reasons and it'd end up feeling a lot like a SecurityManager based system.
Yeah it's about costs. I care about a lot of things, but the causes I actually give money to is a much shorter list. If personal data was radioactive, and leaking it cost companies real money, then more money would get spent on security. (and insurance, and lawyers.)
Cybersecurity is a fragile system in Taleb's fragile-robust-antifragile framework. That is, as t->infinity, the probability of a hack approaches 1, because you only need to slip up once, and there is a small probability of the system's maintainers slipping up each day.
sel4's guarantees break if you have DMA, e.g., from your NIC. It doesn't help with timing attacks. It doesn't cover your network stack. AFAIK, no one has taken up the mantle from Project Everest, so you'll need to write a verified TLS library. Once you've built all that, you can start thinking about your database/application/whatever. Then of course you'll have to verify all your dev's machines and scripts to ensure nobody is misusing a credential that can get stolen.
"So what?" you say. "Making a heavier-than-air metal tube take off and land millions of times per year without a catastrophe is also hard, and we no longer expect most or even many of those tubes to blow up or fall down."
Mother nature is not spending $$$ using AI and HI adversarially trying to find the exact combination of atoms that will cause your device to fail.
> sel4's guarantees break if you have DMA, e.g., from your NIC.
Modern CPUs support IOMMU. If you set that up, your NIC will DMA to a virtual address, managed by the operating system.
> It doesn't help with timing attacks. It doesn't cover your network stack
It does help with all this stuff, because your network stack and whatever else can be split off into isolated processes which talk over capabilities. Compromises in those processes are of course terrible. But they don't automatically allow kernel level RCE like on windows / linux.
A piece of software Lockheed made gave its outputs in US Customary units (not following their specification), and NASA expected it in SI units (as their specification expected)
It seems like it should have been checked by Lockheed not NASA since supposedly NASA provided a specification, that specified the units, and paid for the software no?
> "The output from the SM_FORCES application code as required by a MSOP Project Software Interface Specification (SIS) was to be in metric units of Newtonseconds (N-s)"
(MSOP = Mars Surveyor Operations Program).
One of the recommendations was
> "Conduct software audit for specification compliance on all data transferred between JPL and Lockheed Martin Astronautics"
So yes, NASA should have checked the provided software more thoroughly, but also Lockheed should have actually followed the spec they were given. I doubt the SIS is available online to check any harder
Should have been checked by both. Lockheed should have checked because of contractual obligations; NASA should have checked because of minimal engineering practices (bugs happen in all your dependencies).
They happen and some are put there on purpose too. In this case it's not a "bug" in your dependencies, and yes NASA since it's using public funding should have been more careful, but ultimately it's Lockheed that was paid to do something no?
Lockheed's job is to follow the customer's specifications.
NASA's job is to check to make sure what they paid for is what they received.
I do this every single day as a quality inspector here. I don't know why a bunch of highly-degreed engineers can't do a simple job that a person with oonly a GED does without fail.
Actually no, it's Lockheed's that should have had a test-suite and conformance-suite for it, but probably only has a C-Suite. If the program is non-trivial proving its correctness can be very expensive to prove, both money and time wise, and something that is done contrary to the spec is obviously on the one executing the spec and being paid for it, which probably wasn't cheap and probably these expenses add to the "NASA only burns money..." narrative.
No, if NASA chose not to triple check everything before sending something into space then they are as much to blame as the supplier. Blindly assuming something works like it should without testing it makes an ass out of u and me.
Very fitting for the AI age as well.
"Yeah I just put the specs of the project you're paying me to do (in NASA's case, probably 100% public funds) but Claude the gimp missed the units because all previous training data use Stones and Yards as units, you should have verified it yourself! I just prompt!"
SeL4 or proof assistant are not panacea. They do not help if assumptions about the task are wrong. And correctly formulating the task in real world is very messy.
So physical security is just as important. I really like how ARINC serial bus on planes work. One can have a reader that is physically incapable of sending anything to the writer. This allows to connect entertainment systems to flight data sensors safely.
In Airbus this system is replaced with Ethernet switches that in software ensures separation of traffic. The software was proven mathematically. But I am skeptical that it is absolutely bulletproof as a client under malicious control can influence Ethernet signaling and may exploit hardware bugs.
> SeL4 or proof assistant are not panacea. They do not help if assumptions about the task are wrong. And correctly formulating the task in real world is very messy.
Nobody said sel4 was a panacea.
My claim is that doing this kind of computer security is possible. It's just expensive and inconvenient. We know how to make computers a lot more secure than they are today. The limiting factor isn't humanity's knowledge. The limit is that barely anyone wants to pay the bill.
> The limit is that barely anyone wants to pay the bill
Do you even have any experience with how most companies work? SMEs barely have the cashflow to cover their daily expenses, let alone suddenly pay thousands for regular professional security audits and overhauls of their code. This is why security is an afterthought.
If restaurants can't make sure their food is safe to eat, they shouldn't be allowed to be in business.
If builders can't build houses to code, and the buildings fall down, they shouldn't be allowed to stay in business.
If civil engineers build bridges that fail. Or doctors hurt patients. Or police officers shoot innocent people, they shouldn't keep their jobs.
Software engineers are no different. If you collect my user data and it's at high risk of leaking on the dark web, either clean up your act or close shop.
The main issue is that market evolution will always surfaces the most cost-efficient entities within the ecosystem pressures.
That means designing the ecosystem pressures is crucial: things more meaningful than just pure capitalist private-profit logic must by enforced by thoughtful regulation or otherwise the ecosystem converges for private-profit of a small sliver of individuals (billionaires) to the detriment of all other ecosystem members (99% of the world population).
This holds for anything broader than pure private gain, may it be security, social fairness or ecological topics. Sole monetary-value optimization for private gain must be properly constrained or else it results in pure predatory capitalism that implodes society from within, may it be through leaky security, poisoned environments or social unrest.
Yeah this is an interesting argument with respect to why we keep burning carbon. For both software and systems security and rapid climate change, we know the solution. But we haven’t been able to sway the incentives and the system keeps churning out bad results.
You mean something is theoretically possible, but in practice only works at small scale and is otherwise effectively impossible. You only have so many resources for all those big topics.
And after you spent all the world's resources on the "perfect", formally bug-free software, you get hacked via social engineering or malicious insider.
> My claim is that doing this kind of computer security is possible.
But your evidence does not support that claim. SeL4 has proven that it is possible to design a secure microkernel and prove its security guarantees. It does not prove that you can build entire systems (filesystem+database+web server+browser) on top of that kernel while maintaining the same security guarantees.
I'm all for improving the state of computer security, and I'd love for capability systems like SeL4 to become more prevalent. But it's only a microkernel, and it's by no means certain that the PeopleSoft vulnerability exploited here required a kernel-level compromise.
I don’t expect every piece of software written to be proven correct like SeL4. But I don’t think we don’t need to do that to get big improvements in the security of a lot of systems. Honestly the biggest insight I take from sel4 is that we can get improvements in security by breaking up a large program into isolated pieces. Give each piece as few permissions as possible, so a compromise of one part doesn’t lead to a whole system compromise. And give them a way to talk. This has big benefits for reliability - since you can fail and restart individual processes. And it has benefits for security, since a system compromise should require an attack of multiple systems simultaneously.
Wasm does this. Erlang does this. SeL4 does this. Chrome is built this way. The windows driver model is moving this way. And so on. You want a solid core to build around - which is what SeL4 and beam try to be. Then it’s up to us to use those primitives and build good software. Combine that with a memory safe language (rust, go, c#, etc) to protect against buffer overruns and use after frees. And a picture starts to form of how you can build software that is a lot more secure by default.
I don’t think perfect security is worth the cost for many companies. But so many security leaks happen because of amateur hour somewhere. Bugs happen - I get that. But a single bug in a C++ program shouldn’t immediately lead to RCE with system level privileges. This stuff isn’t rocket science.
> SeL4’s security and reliability proofs still hold in the world of LLMs
Oftentimes the weakest link is the human operator who has direct access to those systems, not the computer system itself. Good old social engineering, in other words.
Even though one could use LLMs for social engineering, come to think of it, like re-enacting the movie "Her" involving a modern AI as Scarlett Johansson and an engineer working for the water utility as the romantic target.
> ...there is such a thing as computer security...
> Of course there is.
A bit over-optimistic when looking at hardware vulneraribilties like Spectre/Meltdown. Software security isn't worth much when it runs on vulnerable hardware (at least Spectre/Meltdown could be worked around in software though).
One time? lscpu on my system lists two dozen CPU vulnerabilities known to the kernel. I stopped tracking them a long time ago when it felt like every week brought another information leak or bypass.
Spot on. And it's gonna get a lot worse now that "but my slop machine's code is run through a really large number of tests, like enormously many, I don't need to understand the code!" is apparently not an embarrassing way to do development anymore.
> Secure software is - somehow - niche. And as such, it’s much more expensive.
Its not expensive because its niche, its expensive because its hard. Its a lot easier to learn a bit of html and javascript and knock up some web projects then it is to become proficient at all the things necessary to be good at security. Generally it also takes consulting with maths experts who have spent their life studying cryptography and as such command a decent wage.
There's very little, if any, incentive to do anything more securely than absolutely necessary. It is only a problem, when it is a problem and is treated that way in nearly every org I've worked in.
"Its not expensive because its niche, its expensive because its hard."
I'd counter and suggest it is expensive because almost nobody gives a damn about the first 3 layers in the OSI model, and have pushed most security responsibility up to layers 4-7. That's roughly half of your attack surface still exposed.
Lol, just because a tool exists that in theory can be used to potentially do part of what it takes, doesn’t mean anyone will use it that way consistently or reliably.
mind that just because SeL4 micro-kernel is proven secure, there's no guarantee that all leyers on top of it are. There's a presentation (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhUwwsVq5E4) that's pretty much about "so we gave sel4 to students, and NONE of them managed to build utilities on top safely - now we have to provide our own Core Platform implementation to be sure"
But most important of all, the highest level - human operators - are not provable secure anyway. Any castle gate can be opened from inside - so why have the gate anyway? Security by absence is absolute
the actual answer to this is accreditation. you will see safety standards rise across the board if engineers risk losing their license for shipping unsafe features.
This is the major problem I see with flock cameras. They say it’s okay because they’re only using it for good. But can they actually protect the honeypots they create? No. Is it their fault if it gets stolen? Yeah but at that point cats out of the bag.
Have they ever even attempted to claim it’s only for good? I think at best they’ve gone with the: you need to give up a little privacy to catch the bad guys.
Followed up with a lot of “we just make the tool, we can’t be held responsible for how it’s used”.
Computer security =/ publicly-accessable server security.
A linux box, layered in encryption and not plugged into any network = damb secure.
A network-connected linux box with a hardened OS, firewalled, acting only as a file server, given regular updates and 24/7 monitoring = less likely to be "hacked" than struck by lightning.
A hard drive with its power supply physically switched off = 100% secure from external attack.
Not a joke. The keys for editing the world's most important files, the root zone, are kept on no-power drives in air-gapped safes. They have yet to be hacked.
Air gaps are not magical, they will not stop the flood. The electrical grid has to communicate with itself to load balance, so you can run dedicated wires with giant cut-me signs pointing at it, or you can use symmetrical key encryptors to route it over the intenet. You needed to use the encryptors anyway, so why not. If bad software gets in via thumb drives music disks etc (and it will of the flood is pointed at you) it can still do bad things. But so can a hunting rifle pointed at a transformer station. That nearly blacked out all of socal once.
They sent the data along the lines. Initially that was just the frquency. Drooped low? Ramp it up, running high, turn it down. That is effectively a spring mass damper system and it always had instability conditions that caused problems. They begand to modulate additional data, including voice, analog over the lines to add additional controls. As more people joined, and load became less predictable even that wasn't enough. Every endpoint now measures load at something like 30hz and that won't fit across the lines. They added separate dedicated fiber or microwave along towers. Those still get used. Probably sometimes unencrypted still. They are targets I'm sure. Then we have renewables and nuclear with their mostly inflexible power supply, that makes it harder to stabilize yet. The control loop stuff is often physically separate, but that is the older stuff and less secure. The data from all those houses still has to get onto the logically/physically isolated control network somehow, so that is a vulnerability too. Anyone with a zigbee radio cam see the encrypted packets.
If you look at my sibling post I explain that is how they used to do control, but they outgrew it. The spinnup times made it act like a spring damper system and it had bad control states even then.
Yes, there's always been people phoning power plants and asking them to make bigger changes than the small automatic self balancing changes, but at the micro level the grid drags thermal power plants along with it via governers.
Most control still works this way. See the postmortem on the Iberia black start. Renewables that were trying to do frequency following drifted out of sync and injected misaligned power into the grid. They couldn't even figure out where it was coming from their telemetry is so bad. Then they were asking the gas plants to spin up to add inertia but it was too late as the boilers were cold. IT and other smart grid ideas were conspicuously absent.
This is why I quit. You're all (excepting the parent) absolutely delusional. Computer security is literally snake oil. We kniw how ro do things right but we refuse to because it's too expensive.
> It is unthinkable to me that anyone believes there is such a thing as computer security
Of course they do. Not everyone has the level of technical expertise the average HN user does. Turning around to them and saying “duh of course all your personal data leaked” doesn’t feel like a helpful response. Especially when they don’t even have control over where their data lives anyway.
The assumption that these hacks were done over the Internet is kinda presumptuous. Hackers social engineer, too, you know.. especially the competent ones.
> It is unthinkable to me that anyone believes there is such a thing as computer security
Nobody I know in security hardening or vulnerability research has ever believed that anything is perfectly secure. It's not black and white. There are degrees to this.
I find this fatalistic thinking that every database should be assumed compromised to be subtly harmful. Everyone I know who thought that way waltzed right into lax security practices. "Good enough, what's the point, if anyone wants it bad enough they're going to get it anyway"
Mostly true but there is largely a massive amount of negligence in the tech industry, with a particular emphasis on shops that prioritize shipping “features.”
For every engineer that takes security seriously, there are 99 engineers that don’t. It’s an uphill battle.
This is a bit oversimplified, and relies heavily on understanding your threat vectors and agents. You haven't spoke about audio even.
There's a reason that many military and intelligence organizations worldwide physically cut / remove wifi and bluetooth chips from boards. The same is done when audio is identifiable, and specific hardware (only) greenlit.
I've lost hours of my life to calls explaining exactly this, only to have people ignore it, only to further have folks come back, tail between their legs. The worst part is learning this in industry, as I did. There's a reason for in-industry advisors. I wish that I had learned this the easy way.
> For example, do not hook your goddamn water or traffic or electricity infrastructure up to the goddamn Internet, and then, do fire the guy who suggested it.
The problem is, most water, sewage and even many electrical infrastructure isn't manned any more. You need some form of remote surveillance and control, and practically, you will need to go with some sort of VPN based network.
"The correct analogy for computer security is not locks and keys and doors and gates. It is a house in a floodplain. Your house will not survive the flood of it hits you. Do not store anything critical or irreplaceable in that house."
Depends how the house was build. Here in europe there are plenty of old houses build in areas that experienced periodic flooding - there the advice is simply, do not store anything critical in the basement.
That's the result of all this silly offensive cyber and hackback and the government buying 0day nonsense. Imagine how the software landscape would look like if the security services would have directed all these resources into securing the software in use.
FWIW, you could drop the words "computer" from your first paragraph and it would still be true. People doing security outside of "cyber" know this.
If you have ${anything}, assume it is semi-public, meaning if someone was interested enough in accessing it, they could do it. "Fort Knox" isn't the right analogy for physical security; the primary question isn't whether something can be breach, but how much would it cost the attacker to do it.
A system where expected costs to attackers >> expected profit they could reasonably make from succeeding, is considered secure in typical case (exception: special cases where attackers may be driven by non-material reasons - think terrorism, politics).
Computer security is largely still stuck in "Fort Knox" thinking.
> For example, do not hook your goddamn water or traffic or electricity infrastructure up to the goddamn Internet, and then, do fire the guy who suggested it.
That ship has sailed. "Modern problems require modern solutions", that infrastructure will be in some way accessible over network is a necessity at this point, the question should be, how to keep it difficult for normal attackers to mess with it, without preventing the system from fulfilling its intended function.
> The correct analogy for computer security is not locks and keys and doors and gates. It is a house in a floodplain. Your house will not survive the flood of it hits you. Do not store anything critical or irreplaceable in that house.
The correct analogy for computer security is a house. Scale security proportionally to actual importance of what's inside, and accept that nonzero amount of houses will be broken into; that's just insurance writeoff. Leave the 20-meter walls with towers and armed guards and helicopter gunships on fast-dial for the critical junctions, while keeping in mind that this is not perfect either - it won't stop an open nation state attack, at best maybe slow it down.
For critical infrastructure, I'd honestly focus on redundancy, resiliency, limiting blast radius and procedures to recover quickly, over trying to turn every physical or virtual substation into unpenetrable fortress.
(Another thing physical security gets right, that cyber side seems to ignore: security does not and cannot exist in isolation; criminal justice system and law enforcement are part of it, and at extreme end, threat of military intervention against a state that aids and abets the perpetrators. The possibility of sending "men with guns" after perpetrators is core part of securing a system or space, it's literally what they are for and why we fund it with taxes.)
> It is unthinkable to me that anyone believes there is such a thing as computer security
There is such thing but almost never a priority. In the corp I work leadership talks a lot about security but when comes to the incentives the road-map takes priority over the security. If you deliver fast you'll be promoted, if you're a paying attention to the security no-one will appreciate it and the manager will hate you for delaying delivery. Many managers I interact with see new features as the main value development teams should provide and security, reliability and other QoS as a waste to be minimised.
Another issue is that even if security will be a priority and managers will be on board (good lock changing the culture tough) we probably cannot build secure systems while keeping the insane level of complexity we have nowadays. Switching to simpler but secure system will require sacrifices in features/convenience.
I've been telling people for years that it's probably easier that they get used to the thought that everything about them is "public" in some way than waiting for the day when computers and databases are suddenly safe from hacking.
That doesn't mean that all of your neighbors know your medical history, but you have to assume that someone who wants to know those details about you will know them.
I have lost faith in people protecting any significant database from hackers.
true, especially corporate SecOps, it is theatre, mere tickboxery to defer liability.
Most security professionals I've met in my career border on being non-technical, there are of course security researchers and a whole arcane and academic field that exists well beneath the surface but it is so far removed from the every-day.
There is a difference between "someone being interested" and a state actor being interested.
I am more concerned about my cloud data being published in a leak.
But then on the other hand, if I use mainstream cloud services, a broad leak with no specific interest in my data would need to be exabytes in size and would take years to transfer even with a 100 Gbps connection.
> For example, do not hook your goddamn water or traffic or electricity infrastructure up to the goddamn Internet, and then, do fire the guy who suggested it.
Ask the Iranians how impenetrable even physical isolation actually is - their centrifuges were still destroyed even though they were air gapped (the infamous Stuxnet). Ultimately all computerized systems are vulnerable to sufficiently determined cyber-adversaries.
You also need to make various cost-benefit analysis decisions for all of these things. Does the extra security you gain by keeping your system disconnected from the Internet actually increase all-around availability and resilience?
In particular, integrating highly variable power sources like solar and wind into the grid requires much more complex synchronization between producers, storage, and consumers in order to function properly. Trying to build a renewable grid without Internet access is doomed to extremely inefficient, if possible at all. Building an alternate network would be extremely expensive and ultimately useless (since every house in the country needs to connect to it, it would be just as vulnerable as the actual Internet anyway). So, ultimately you must connect your power grid to the Internet to actually provide service, despite the security risks.
Perhaps the situation with the water supply or traffic is different, so maybe this is not as applicable.
a lot of this infrastructure is managed at municipal level. There are ministry mandates. But a lot of this is run by a small town with a small budget. Compromises exist like the ability to remote desktop because there is no budget for 24/7 operators.
Billions of people have lived productively in flood plains over thousands of years. The "just don't do it" mindset is reductive and counterproductive. In life there are risks, mitigations, and recoveries. Computer security is not unique in that regard.
The recent Epic vs Health Gorilla lawsuit is an example of how your medical records have almost certainly made it to the hands of many people you will never know about.
The fatalism is understandable, but "no one can keep a database safe" isn't quite right. Some organizations do a better job than others.All in all, of course, the best way to keep information secret is to keep it only in your own head, all other methods are less reliable
Yes, huge amounts of your medical information is for sale. In 2024, Change Healthcare (CHC) was hacked and held ransom. The hackers were in the system for over a week before everything was pulled offline.
CHC is the largest claims clearinghouse in the US; about 100m people's insurance claims go through there each year.
The hackers asked for a ransom ($35m iirc) to delete the data, which United Healthcare (who owns them, because of course they do) paid. But it seems that the collective negotiating on behalf of the actual hackers rug pulled, so the actual hackers didn't get paid.
This is more than simply medical records. It includes who is active duty military and their family. If you can map where soldiers are, you know roughly the size of different military bases. If you know which types of capabilities are operated out of which bases, you can get a pretty good look of how the US is allocating personnel.
It was crazy working on recovery from this at the time. It should have been front page news, but wasn't.
Why would that be front page news? You can literally buy tracking data for soldiers in the field, not from hacks from Google, study their movement patterns as much as you want. This has already been done and resulted in attacks.
Virtually all medical info in the US is sent in plain text via the numerous MLLP connections that just rely on the local network’s access level to maintain security. Big companies act like it is enough and HIPAA is a paper tiger here.
Maybe we should just give up on custodial trust re: people we don't know.
If somebody wants data about me, they can write the query, I'll approve it, and it can hit a server designated by me and run by somebody I know personally.
It's not just a privacy/security concern. People who get too close to large piles of sensitive data tend to start behaving poorly in other ways too--they might be compelled to misrepresent it. Apparently the forces of corruption are too great. Maybe the way to avoid exposing each other to such hazards is to just maintain smaller piles of data, closer to the people that the data is about.
A corollary to "know your server admin" is that a typical server has maybe a few dozen users' worth of data. The juice just isn't worth the squeeze to target them one at a time via traditional means (i.e. phishing, social engineering... human facing stuff).
Also, it's a lot harder to phish somebody who is on a first name basis with 100% of their users. It's not enough to merely have a plausible backstory, you have to impersonate one of their friends.
Of course you can still hack through whatever protocol indexes them and multiplexes queries across them, but now you're presenting a much smaller and easier to defend attack surface.
I think we will just be heading for a future with very little secrecy.
I think privacy will remain, perhaps even improve, because people are much less inclined to snoop when it cannot be done covertly. No secrecy means no covert activity.
Information is everywhere and with the increasing ability to analyse it, not only does it enable access to explicit information, but the ability to infer from increasing volumes of data that will make it hard to hide anything.
Spectre reads protected memory by tiny vriarions in timing. You can now measure the pulse of people from film. You can recover audio from a room by analysing frames of a video recording of a chip packet taken with mobile phone camera.
This kind of data residue is everywhere, collecting only what is publicly available can probably tell you more than you could hope to know about anything that happens. The only thing preventing it is the ability to consider it all together. Those walls are swiftly crumbling.
Not just government employees, employees of government contractors who held or applied for security clearances. I’ve never worked for the government but the CCP got my SF-86. My employer’s infosec group told us they believe that the same group was also responsible for the Mariott data breach in the same timeframe and that it was believed to be part of an effort by the CCP to establish a complete dossier on each individual in the entire military-industrial complex. The best advice they could offer was to disable all social media accounts and lock down our credit reports. :shrug:
I don't think it's that no one can do it but rather we always use the cheapest option and then get surprised that we get what we pay for.
I'm not just talking about bids. The idea presets itself prolifically. We all work in tech, I'm sure you see it on a daily basis. Rush Rush, no time to think, just do it. 6mo later, "there's so much shit! How could we have ever prevented this?" Rinse, lather, repeat
Gmail seems to be okay. S3 as well. The databases that hold the PRISM/FAA702 data seem to be kept secure. Nobody’s leaked google3. The password hashes for Instagram and WhatsApp haven’t ever been dumped.
It’s entirely possible to keep large databases secure. It takes competence and commitment though, something federal police don’t have for IT.
Every day 2 major organizations get hacked, whether by groups or state actors, and America continues to sit on its hands.
The government should be creating a new digital defense department to better defend our country, and fund the defense of our nation, but instead it is busy renaming lakes and renaming "AI".
What were the sysops doing? I never understand these hacks. These must be deliberate stunts... they let the monkeys run amok with the bananas and they watch what happens.
The article says "All FBI data was compromised." Entirely possible that they have the case files on every investigation the FBI has ever conducted, all the data on Americans that the FBI collects in the course of doing investigations, etc. And they now know who shot JFK.
The article implies that this was the actual motive for this attack. The group is conducting counterintelligence on the FBI so that they know when their members are being investigated, and they're using the information gained to "track, intimidate, and harass the FBI agents investigating them".
I will tell you where this gets really embarrassing for the FBI.
Oracle enterprise applications are a gold mine for attackers precisely because nobody treats them as security-critical systems.
In 2025 the Clop ransomware gang discovered that Oracle E-Business Suite has a critical vulnerability (CVE-2025-61882) that allows unauthenticated remote code execution.
Graceful Spider (tracked as Clop affiliates) started exploiting this in early August, well before Oracle issued a patch in October. That’s a two-month window where attackers had free rein.
All you need to know about Clop is that they got fucked by SH as well just a few days ago.
ShinyHunters defaced Clop's Tor leak site and added its own branding and messages. SH claims it stole source code, system logs, plugins, and Tor onion service keys. SH says it plans to give Clop 72 hours to respond to an extortion message.
Say what you want but these kids got balls. Won’t help them once SOCOM starts dealing with them, but they had a good run so far. I think hacking the FBI is as close as you can fly to the sun before the hammer drops.
In February this year they breached Wynn Resorts and lifted data on 800,000-plus employees. Can you guess the entry point?
If you guessed Oracle PeopleSoft, you were right.
Now you’d think the FBI IT people would have noticed that oracle software is a potential national security risk, if multiple ransomware groups keep focusing specifically on the shit Larry Elison personally have to seem vibe coded, over and over.
But Ka$h replaced most of the competent people at the FBI with Ka$h people and by pure luck Oracle won a $396m HR government contract this summer. Who wouldn’t want to supply the most secure software product to manage some of the most sensitive data within the agency, if not the Oracle Moscow branch.
> Separately, the cybercrime group ShinyHunters claimed to have exfiltrated student, financial-aid, immigration, health, and administrative records from PeopleSoft instances at more than 100 organizations, predominantly universities. The group stated it had previously targeted an *FBI PeopleSoft server* before pivoting to educational institutions already compromised in earlier campaigns. Oracle has not publicly confirmed the scope or remediation status of these incidents.
So the FBI knew, and had it coming, and if stuff like this happens, THE HEAD needs to roll. And all of his buddies in IT should permanently get to spend their time outside the government at the seafood buffet at Ka$hs favorite gentleman’s club as well.
Lol, the linked article (from the summer) even has the chapter questioning this purchase in light of ShinyHunters having already had track record of hacking people soft.
(Right, you quote it. It seems almost unrealistic, like the script writers in an absurd story have planted it into supposedly past article)
You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing.
The choice is play ball with the USG, or be dead in the water. Once you’re large enough, simply abiding by the laws is insufficient to remain unmolested - you must actively play ball or you’ll find that suddenly a TON of regulations now apply to you that didn’t before.
Do you think Apple or SpaceX like dealing with the NSA/CSS/CIA? Or the CCP for that matter? (Apple has backdoored all of iCloud in China for the CCP to be allowed to operate there.) Coinbase and the IRS is one. All the telcos turn over all call metadata and IP backbone taps to the feds without a warrant. Google Joseph Nacchio to see what happens if they don’t.
They’re the only game in town, and you gotta play by their rules if you want to operate at scale at all. No amount of billions of private money will get Trump and his administration un-pissed-off at you.
It’s not a free market, all large industries entirely serve exclusively at the pleasure of the court. This is why we overpay for broadband in every major market, why we overpay for mobile data nationwide, why retail banking sucks, etc.
Which is a really lazy way of looking at the world. If you haven't been paying attention, Trump kicked CNN and a couple others out of the press room, and the rest of the networks banded together to say "nu uh". That's not to say the head of the board of media companies aren't compromised, just that there's more nuance than that.
And the boycott is to deliberately inflict a narcissistic injury to Trump. His attempt to create a state-owned news outlet is an attempt to reduce/minimize that injury. Personally, I think the best defense by the media would be to display his senile rambling conversations - show everyone how insane his actual words are.
AFAICT in Dec 2024 the reasoning was that they had a paywall.
I don't know what percentage of their articles were behind one then, or how that might've changed between then and now. (Well, except for the fact that clearly some of their stuff is public today since we're looking at it.)
If I had my 'druthers "paywall" and "register-wall" would be little icons on the submissions, and then people would choose whether to upvote the more-accessible source, whether the hard-to-read stuff was still important enough to comment on, etc.
404 Media is one of the few news organizations that actually file FOIA and fight for information in courtrooms.
By comparison, the likes of the Verge only run the most mainstream kind of articles. There is no deep, technical analysis of any complex topic. The most technical stuff they post may be those benchmarks they run for laptops. And they certainly don't file for FOIA despite how much (negative) coverage they do for US government agencies -- they leave the hard work to others.
(A quick Google search will confirm all of above.)
The security of this list is essentially the motivation of the plot of Mission Impossible (1996). Except that's the just list of undercover agents, not he whole agency.
496 comments
[ 0.31 ms ] story [ 42.5 ms ] threadOf course if I was the FBI, I would make it so hackers trying to breach the system get a honeypot where all the data is fake, and with LLMs (even poor ones) it would be very easy to fake an entire alternative reality.
I’m sure there’s some value in that.
If your systems are compromised and need to coordinate, what do you even do if you can't trust anything, assuming the attacker is still inside the network.
If the goal is to exfiltrate data, I guess it is. If the goal is to make the people working in the FBI feel vulnerable - and pushing out this sample data would suggest that it is - I don't think it is. You could probably do the same with data from social media sites and data brokers.
Consider open investigations with covert agents. Leaking their identitys could compromise entire investigations.
Hopefully there was some forsight in washing undercover agents from these systems to other secure ones or something otherwise that's pretty bad.
Are you saying that Ethan Hunt was involved?
That's a problem regular companies need to write up a plan for (but most of them probably don't put too much effort into it).
Even with the descend into incompetence the USA has been pulling for the past few years, I still expect the FBI to have a plan for exactly that sort of compromise.
Perhaps firing expertise and hiring incompetents wasn't a good idea.
It's okay. Larry got another island.
If anything Oracle will "contribute" a lot to congress people's midterm reelection and in a few months all will be forgotten and Oracle will get more Gov. contracts.
Do they have any positive reputation left, or is it just more negative from the previous negative position?
You mean the expertise that told them to buy PeopleSoft years ago, or do you actually believe the FBI home-rolled its own HRMS in the last year?
And there is no glamour on sense of duty when your main job is to make sure that the Epstein files are not revealed so USA citizens are in the dark about who were the rapists and criminals in the list. An awful job.
Just goes to show that the wall of IT bureaucracy does nothing. I'm sure they had an ATO, a several-hundred-page SBOM, compliance audits, etc.
If they did have it set up, then somebody wasn't doing their job. If they didn't have it set up, they didn't comply (which is also not doing their job). I see this all the time. The security analysts send tickets to people when they see major issues and nobody is held accountable for inaction. Management asleep at the wheel (which is also their cover, can't be blamed for what you made sure you never knew about).
They trusted Oracle. I'm not sure I believe you.
Still skeptical, but the FBI's vendors are just as vulnerable to 0-days as Hertz's vendors.
Now, I made that totally up, but this is how things go. They'll watch one area like a hawk only to leave another glaringly wide door open.
What is even worse is there are a lot of horrifically inefficient apps out there calling way too much data for no reason and suddenly a hack of an entire database gets lost as noise in relation to all the traffic on the servers and networks.
In the pilot, the Galactica was literally being turned into a museum, and that's why they lived.
Only Expanse and The Orville compares in the past decade I guess.
Some individual moments/episodes are still great but most of it is very cringe inducing and/or didn’t age well as a “joke.” Knowing what we know about Adam Baldwin (and Whedon frankly but Baldwin is a special kind of gross) doesn’t help either.
Baldwin…well, he was one of the reasons gamergate became a thing, which is by itself bad enough but also hardly his only offense. He’s pretty awful. So knowing his “manosphere” proximity makes his act a little too real, like Spacey with American Beauty.
Shame too. Hero of canton (is that the episode name?) was pretty memorable and has a beautiful ending.
Even the whole "science person solves the problem under pressure after getting an insight" thing suddenly seems a lot more realistic now that LLMs have actually become good.
They even had to essentially recommission a Viper that was being used as an exhibit.
Though having a person interpretingthe degradation progress and relaying it to the rest of the team could be a usable scene.
e.g.
https://ubidots.com/blog/content/images/2024/10/siemens-sima...
It would be a fun exercise trying to recreate a lot of the screens from movies and tv shows. "This is unix! I know this!"
IIRC, the company's idea is to create a harmonious sound bed when everything's fine, and make different kinds of "out of the norm" alerts use a variety of sounds so that nursing staff get more info about what's wrong before finding the thing thats sounding an alert and looking at its screen.
There are many people that run open weight LLMs. And unsurprisingly, they don't all have a copy of the FBI employee database.
If you mean "using" an open weight LLM in combination with other tools or even potentially frontier models, then that's a lot more likely.
China hacked 22.1 million records of US government employees:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Office_of_Personnel_Manag...
Not much, Revolut just got tricked by hackers into giving out customer information: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49682087
For example, do not hook your goddamn water or traffic or electricity infrastructure up to the goddamn Internet, and then, do fire the guy who suggested it.
The correct analogy for computer security is not locks and keys and doors and gates. It is a house in a floodplain. Your house will not survive the flood of it hits you. Do not store anything critical or irreplaceable in that house.
The calculus has certainly changed. Hacking is becoming even more frequent and… I’m not really sure what the equilibrium looks like.
It’s not really an option to stop using computers or networks. But it’s going to be way too expensive (or maybe even impossible) to secure even just critical systems.
Maybe banks and governments can secure themselves (and that’s a big IF) but it really feels like something fundamentally has to change.
Software security has just been a fun time of ignoring the exponentially growing number of bears for the last few decades so you can continue to use systems unfit for the threat landscape because they are cheap.
The problem is that most companies don't care if they get hacked so long as the hackers are just taking data and not interfering in their ability to bill customers and make money.
They face zero meaningful consequences if their data gets leaked. The money they save by not taking security and employee/customer privacy seriously will more than pay for the year of "identity protection" they'd have to pay for (assuming the hack gets found out) anyway.
They actually care about ransomware, but most of the time that's also something they can comfortably buy their way out of. We've seen a lot of companies pay off ransomware gangs rather than invest in the kinds of robust backups that would make recovery possible/less painful than rewarding the hackers.
What's needed for change is regulation with actual teeth that makes not protecting their data either meaningfully expensive or criminal resulting in executives spending time behind bars for their negligence. Without that, things are only going to get worse, especially as companies experiment with using AI and increase dependence on third parties and cloud providers who themselves become rich targets.
That probably still won't help the FBI though. Our government isn't exactly big on holding themselves accountable or even prioritizing competency right now.
Hasn't been since before Vietnam.
Experienced Ransomware gangs will set the price target as something high, but not cost more than the price of being down a few days while you rebuild, making paying them seem like the most cost-effective solution
Let's say my cryptosig gets hacked by SkyNet, or my agent goes rogue. Either way someone files a million loan applications in my name! Normally my agent uses that to buy $200/month of Funko pops, or negotiate my recent purchase of a used car.
I get the notification from my cryptosig company. I freak out, report as fraud, and wait.
They comp the $3000 advance on my loan the scammer managed to withdraw, and I get off scott free, changing nothing about my behaviour.
If cryptosigs meant I liable for someone stealing my identity like in 2026, I wouldn't use it. I'd negotiate everything myself with document scans, or god-forbid go in person since only I can legally bind myself under my own name.
That sucks! Nobody gets a commission when I make deals with a government ID. Startups don't even allow it as cryptosigs are more secure than scanned passports.
I don't want to do that. When I was 18, I got swindled by a human salesperson into a $1400/month 27% APR muacle car when human soldiers got signing bonuses.
When I let AI own the budget, it leased me a mostly depreciated BMW for $500/month.
I was so grateful that I selected a 40% tip for the AI. I wouldn't want to make things awkward with the companion I spend 8 hours a day talking to, after all. To avoid a conflict of interest she only accepts voluntary fees.
Remove the complexity (all the way down to the hardware quirks), and security will be doable again.
Of course there is. For example, SeL4’s security and reliability proofs still hold in the world of LLMs. The problem is that most software isn’t written on that firm foundation. Instead, most software is made by people with the philosophy of “if it looks like it works, ship it”. You don’t get secure software by working like that, because security vulnerabilities aren’t visible.
We - humans - know how to write secure software. Just like we know how to make safe aeroplanes. The problem isn’t that we lack the capability to make secure computers. The problem is we don’t have a culture of security. Secure software is - somehow - niche. And as such, it’s much more expensive. And nobody wants to pay.
It's often possible. But not all systems are vulnerable to undervoltage attacks. For example, I don't think the iphone secure enclave is vulnerable to this.
And good security uses "defence in depth". Multiple layers which each individually need to be compromised to break the whole thing. To hack chrome, you need a vulnerability in the renderer or VM. Then you also need a sandbox escape, and a way to use that to attack the browser's parent process. This is much harder to do.
Then there's decapping / depotting, a world of different types of microscopy - some destructive some not, directed EM attacks, etc.
> And good security uses "defence in depth"
And automation has enabled "offense in depth"
> To hack chrome, you need a vulnerability in the renderer or VM. Then you also need a sandbox escape, and a way to use that to attack the browser's parent process.
Or you just phish the user into installing your exploit. There's always another layer. Always a potential exploit. Because ultimately the same properties of the universe which permit computation within a closed system allow for predictably observing and influencing it. The expense and hassle of doing so are widely variable, of course.
So what? Most attackers aren't nation state adversaries. They're some kid in Wyoming messing around with deepseek. We live in a world where most exploits happen because someone was running an unpatched, 8 year old copy of wordpress. Because they put their insecure mongodb instance on the open internet. Because they used admin / "12345" as the username and password. We don't need to make hacks physically impossible for a nation state adversary. Just really, really difficult and expensive to pull off.
Honestly. If people talked about physical security like they talk about computer security, you'd have people telling you that, because walls can be physically smashed through, they don't bother locking the front door to their house.
The saying is that locks only keep honest people honest. Plenty of evidence of that: https://www.youtube.com/@lockpickinglawyer
It’s not hard to get into a garage but it’s really easy to steal a lawnmower if you leave the door open all night. I wouldn’t call that thief honest but even the minor deterrent of closing the garage was enough to make you not the target.
That youtube channel is great. But is isn't evidence of that saying.
So what? Security systems don't need to be 100% provably secure to add value. It's a mistake to let perfect be the enemy of good.
A perfect system is either extremely limited in scope or flawed in it's assumptions.
By the way, there are countless ways to account for humans. There are entire branches of engineering devoted to this. If you don't want someone to leave the bank with a pen customers use for signing checks, you just chain it to the desk. If you don't want the installer to forget to put the pen-chain in, make a photo of the chain part of the checklist required to get paid. If you want to... etc.
The idea is that you determine an acceptable level of risk, then secure to that level. Maybe the acceptable level of risk chosen by companies is wrong. Maybe we need to increase that risk exposure via heavier fines and regulations. Maybe the cost of reducing that risk is too high already. Maybe we need to fund that. Maybe it's too confusing and we need to research better standard practices. I dunno. But this is not some unsolvable problem.
There really isn't
Ask anyone seriously involved in security - whether computer science related, or in general.
A thought experiment: Think about the most important secrets a country can have - now think how they are still discovered by competing countries, enemies, etc.
As long as there are humans in the loop there is a known weakness.
We know about many famous cases of leaks - like the USSR stealing notes from the manhatten project. But I bet there are thousands of secrets which remain secret. We just don't actually know about them, because, y'know, they're kept secret.
This is EXACTLY what I was talking about. The tech that makes the F-22 an unmitigated terror of the skies is of utmost importance, so it’s still kept secret. The barriers around that information are obnoxious, but effective. What blood type a subsection of your military has is of much less importance. That’s why that data was stolen (See: OPM hack) and our best weapons remain secret.
Decades ago, I worked in a bank in an old building. The door had a card reader for access. You boop your card and the door opened. People would hold the door open for each other all the time out of politeness, even when they didn't know each other. Security told us not to do that, but it's hard to convince people to stop being polite.
I had a laptop stolen from my desk in a place like that once. (Not a bank - but similar door-card reader system). This guy came in in the middle of the day, wearing overalls. He confidently walked through the door after someone, like he belonged there. He walked up to my desk, swiped my laptop and just strolled out.
At the bank, they've replaced the door with mechanical gates and a security guard. The gates - physically - only let one person to walk through at a time. You can't hold a gate open any more. And the security guards stop anyone who tries.
Is it 100% foolproof? No. But it's way more secure. It would have stopped that laptop thief.
There's this pernicious, defeatist attitude that if you can't make a system 100% secure, so you shouldn't try. That's misguided. Most systems can be made orders of magnitude more secure than they are today. It just takes a bit of care and work.
Look at our immune system. Incredibly complex and clever, and able to keep us alive in the face of all sorts of pathogens. It exists because of this cat and mouse game, played over millions of years.
There's people in the highlands of PNG who regularly eat each other. Of course, many are thought to have died due to prion diseases. But now these tribespeople seem to have become largely immune to prion disease. Incredible.
Your comment on PNG, seems to ignore Kuru
Who said anything about a perfect defence? And since when was that the bar?
Just, you're doing it on your own.
Paper referenced in comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49719102
That's not really enough to say "We have found the gene" - it's just really good data to warrant further investigation
Also, the incubation period of the disease is up to 50 odd years, have there been follow up studies?
Computers make copying, processing, manipulating, and disseminating information easy. That is a bad thing for some kinds of information.
I work in secure systems and it’s shocking how many people believe this - the incentives from management are all about it too.
We are headed for scary waters.
Only just when we started to have a resemblance of security we got agile and startups breaking things (making rubbish software to capture a few bucks faster) and now vibe coding and llm assisted hacking.
The point of my, arguably rant, is that there is nothing new under the sun.
It's not a guarantee this time will be the same - but it should temper the worry somewhat.
Previously no one was dumb enough to put that in one electronic database - it was on paper.
This is going to get orders of magnitude worse.
After the DOGE debacle, I suspect that all the previously really secure stuff, is now out there, too. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if some of these leaks, came from that.
FBI employee data is very bad.
This might be part of it...
> Why would anyone with the expertise to make these calls bang their head against the wall trying to educate bureaucrats about these things
But I suspect this might be most of it: good engineering is boring (to the recipient). Preemptively solving problems gets no credit.
The only solution I can come up with is some form of certification or paid code review from a third party. I know that at least for Windows prior to 7 Microsoft actually allowed some parties to come in and check the code/checksum on an air-gaped computer. We somehow moved to "trust more" in the last decade, and now we can trust nobody
LLMs have been a huge force multiplier. Here.
If that data got out (which probably happened within hours of the data being dumped to insecure storage), then it’s probably already been analyzed and used to leverage access.
Why are you so interested in defending DOGE?
Not all hacks are caused by pure negligence, laziness or stupidity, but most of them are. Even a little effort goes a long way.
My grandfather spent a couple decades as a builder, ran a construction crew. Whatever the project was, he wanted to know everyone he hired personally was going to reinforce and report to him anything they had the slightest doubt about. "Always hammer in an extra nail" was basically his motto.
What we do ain't that different. The difference is that when an apartment building collapses, it's bigger news than when a govenrment database does.
Also when a building collapses, people blame the builders. When software leaks user data, the engineers and companies face no repercussions.
- nothing is, can be, or even should be 100% secure;
- security is a trade-off against costs and usability, and those two other factors are more important - if "properly secured" product/service cannot fulfill its function anymore, then you may just as well not make it;
- security isn't done in isolation from other systems and the world at large; "if this happens we'll go straight to filing crime report with the police" is perfectly legitimate security measure (even if it works somewhat less well on the Internet)
Those running projects with these beliefs are sputtering and producing impressive PoCs that struggle to make it into production - either through underestimating the amount of detail needed to scale, or often throwing away good practices in favor of letting LLMs handle tradeoffs that later blow up.
Theres plenty of good ways to utilize LLMs to speed things up, but so many teams got so incentivized by management to move fast at any cost that they’ve thrown out “load-bearing” good practices for software. That bet hasn't been paying off the way they’d hoped. It’s now clear that they thought they’d be able to massively downsize the engineering orgs. Massive token spend is giving very little RoI and now like other companies they’re trying to rein in the biggest spenders who are often not producing value.
Eh. If only it was that simple. I mean, yes, money is always a factor, but not nearly as big of a factor as 'my convenience outweighs pretty much everything ( until it causes sufficient amount of havoc.. and even then.. )'. You can see it in just about everything. It is not just the money. It is the convenience that drives most of the unsecure behavior.
Depends on the "we". "We" have the capability to make secure computers like how "we" have the capability to make EUV lithography machines. There exists a relatively small number of people and organizations in the world who can do so. Microsoft does not have that capability. Google does not have that capability. Linux does not have that capability. Amazon does not have that capability. Apple does not have that capability. Cisco does not have that capability. IBM does not have that capability. etc. All of those organizations have tried for literal decades, thumped their chests about how they have awesome security year after year, and yet have totally and utterly failed despite their best efforts.
Acquiring the capability to do so is difficult and challenging and requires years to invent if you start right this very second and know what you need to do, which these organizations emphatically do not. We need security at scale and fast. The only way forward is to scale up working solutions rather than letting the bozos who put us in this spot fail at scale with yet another promise that this time for sure they will solve the problem they have repeatedly failed at for decades.
> Microsoft does not have that capability. Google does not have that capability. Linux does not have that capability. Amazon does not have that capability. Apple does not have that capability. Cisco does not have that capability. IBM does not have that capability. etc
This is all by choice. They could easily have that capsbility, very unlike EUV.
You really think that if they could have they would not have, even just for bragging rights? Or are we going with that it is some kind of task demanding enormous expenditure even though the organizations that have made secure systems are infinitesimally small in comparison?
Microsoft has spent orders of magnitude more money and time than the organizations that have succeeded and the result of their efforts is Windows. That says everything you need to know about their capabilitys.
If windows was reimplemented as a capability based microkernel like sel4, it would be far more secure. Run drivers in their own isolated processes. Do interprocess communication between them via capabilities and shared memory. Remove all ambient authority from programs. All the programs a user launches stop automatically inheriting all of that user's permissions.
There's no secret knowledge required to do this. The SeL4 team has written extensive documentation of how they did it. They also opensourced their kernel implementation, with correctness proofs for the whole thing.
The reason windows hasn't done it is the cost. You'd have to rewrite half of the NT kernel and refactor everything else. All existing windows drivers would need to be rewritten. If you forced windows userland use a capability based system, you'd essentially be inventing a new way to write windows programs. You'd need to document that, and write a compatibility layer for legacy programs. And solve some UX problems. It would be terribly inconvenient for everyone. Oh, and some programs would run slower as a result.
They could do it if they wanted to. But microsoft just doesn't care about security as much as they care about performance and compatibility. Linux is the same.
macOS does the same but with more developer adoption. Apps don't have the ambient capabilities of the user and must advertise what they need via entitlements embedded in the binaries, or get permission just in time.
"Capabilities" are academic overpromises. This article I wrote is more about language/runtime level capabilities but OS capabilities are not much better.
https://blog.plan99.net/why-not-capability-languages-a8e6cbd...
SeL4 isn't secure because of One Weird Trick that others would adopt if only if they could be made to care enough, it's "secure" because it hardly does anything, which is why nobody uses it and why it has no impact on computer security.
The hard part of desktop security is not changing the operating system. The hard part is getting app developers to care. Most security features added to operating systems are ignored by developers, which is why Apple forces you to adopt some of them as the price of admission to the app store. If they didn't nobody would use them, as can be seen for apps distributed outside of the app store. The reason is security is a market for lemons. Nobody can see the result of security investments so it's irrational to invest. SeL4 has no solution.
Thanks! I quickly googled this point before posting earlier to make sure I was still right. Gemini helpfully told me that yes indeed, drivers in windows run in the kernel's main process. Thanks, AI.
> This article I wrote is more about language/runtime level capabilities but OS capabilities are not much better.
I think I responded to this article at the time. I still find this article somewhat confusing and unconvincing. For example, you conflate Java's SecurityManager with capability systems, even though it seems more like an permission based access control system. Then you point out many of its weaknesses. To what end? What conclusion about capability systems am I supposed to draw from a criticism of this quite different security model?
A capability is not a permission flag. Unlike your example, a good capability system would generally pass all HTTP requests to a given endpoint through a single capability object. You wouldn't need different caps for each HTTP method like SecurityManager apparently requires. It's like file handles. You don't create several different file handles to interact with the same file, one for reading, one for writing and so on. We just open the file once, with whatever options are needed. Then the file descriptor can be passed into any function which needs to access that file. Whoever recieves the file doesn't know if they're talking to an actual file, or some in-memory object or something else.
You also say this:
> File descriptors are a kind of capability provided by the kernel, but a rather odd and inflexible kind. They aren’t a great example of object capabilities.
Huh? File descriptors are often treated as the canonical example of object capabilities. This comment makes me wonder if we're even talking about the same thing. At the risk of being indelicate, are you sure you know what capabilities are?
The point about god objects lands. I also agree that trying to retrofit a language like java to make modules unable to share memory is difficult. But lots of aspects of language design works like this. Consider garbage collectors. Before GC languages existed, I could write the same article talking about the difficulties of hacking a GC into C. But that wouldn't teach me anything about how well the GC works in a language like Java.
Anyway, the main advantage of capabilities is the ability to split programs out into sub-modules such that a compromise or bug in one part of the system doesn't lead to a failure of the entire system. We can talk about whether bringing this into the language itself is a good idea or not. But I feel pretty confident that its a good idea, helping with security and reliability. We can look at Chrome, SeL4, Erlang and - apparently - windows for examples. Even if they don't all think of it as a capability based problem.
Consider the most common task the SecurityManager was deployed for: stopping plugins calling System.exit() by accident. One might say, the right to exit the process should be an object capability. OK. But then where does that object come from? Java programs start at main() and it doesn't receive an object.
You'd need a new design where you pass in a god object to main(), which in turn has properties giving access to a ProcessExiter interface or something similar, and then any code that genuinely needs to exit the process would need to request it in the function arguments, threading it down the stack. You'd get an explosion of types. A simple permissions DSL is much easier to write and reason about, and it gets out of the way when you don't want sandboxing.
Why would you want all HTTP requests to flow through a single capability object? I think it's pretty common to want to let code do GETs but not POSTs. You end up wanting pretty fine grained permissions in a lot of real scenarios.
File descriptors are poor object capabilities because the interface they implement is fixed by the OS, except then there's a weird ioctl escape hatch that isn't properly typed, reflectable, wrappable or interposable. To see what can go wrong with this, consider a recent fix to the Codex sandbox on macOS:
https://github.com/openai/codex/pull/46500
The sandbox forbids writing to a file descriptor except, oops, someone at Apple forgot about the F_TRANSFEREXTENTS ioctl which is still allowed on a read only fd. It should be possible to do what is expected here and just pass in a read only fd where all you can do is call read() and maybe seek(), or perhaps pass in an fd where a specific ioctl is the only thing you can do, but POSIX has no concept of this.
A good example of an object capability system would be Mojo, which I describe in the essay. You can create objects representing capabilities and pass them between sandboxes, in an unforgeable way.
We live in a golden era of prototyping so if you wanted to make a language where everything is a capability passed into main(), you could. The code doesn't have to be executable, you could just mock out some realistic programs and see how the code feels. My guess is you'd need a lot of language features to hide the explicit object capabilities away for ergonomic reasons and it'd end up feeling a lot like a SecurityManager based system.
"So what?" you say. "Making a heavier-than-air metal tube take off and land millions of times per year without a catastrophe is also hard, and we no longer expect most or even many of those tubes to blow up or fall down."
Mother nature is not spending $$$ using AI and HI adversarially trying to find the exact combination of atoms that will cause your device to fail.
Modern CPUs support IOMMU. If you set that up, your NIC will DMA to a virtual address, managed by the operating system.
> It doesn't help with timing attacks. It doesn't cover your network stack
It does help with all this stuff, because your network stack and whatever else can be split off into isolated processes which talk over capabilities. Compromises in those processes are of course terrible. But they don't automatically allow kernel level RCE like on windows / linux.
> "The output from the SM_FORCES application code as required by a MSOP Project Software Interface Specification (SIS) was to be in metric units of Newtonseconds (N-s)"
(MSOP = Mars Surveyor Operations Program). One of the recommendations was
> "Conduct software audit for specification compliance on all data transferred between JPL and Lockheed Martin Astronautics"
So yes, NASA should have checked the provided software more thoroughly, but also Lockheed should have actually followed the spec they were given. I doubt the SIS is available online to check any harder
Both parties fucked up.
Lockheed's job is to follow the customer's specifications.
NASA's job is to check to make sure what they paid for is what they received.
I do this every single day as a quality inspector here. I don't know why a bunch of highly-degreed engineers can't do a simple job that a person with oonly a GED does without fail.
Tell me you don't run AS9100D quality inspections without saying so directly.
Besides it looks like the first AS9100 Standard was released after the incident even happened - perhaps even as a result of this.
So it's totally irrelevant that you both audit software in the space and know the Standard, no pun intended
So physical security is just as important. I really like how ARINC serial bus on planes work. One can have a reader that is physically incapable of sending anything to the writer. This allows to connect entertainment systems to flight data sensors safely.
In Airbus this system is replaced with Ethernet switches that in software ensures separation of traffic. The software was proven mathematically. But I am skeptical that it is absolutely bulletproof as a client under malicious control can influence Ethernet signaling and may exploit hardware bugs.
Nobody said sel4 was a panacea.
My claim is that doing this kind of computer security is possible. It's just expensive and inconvenient. We know how to make computers a lot more secure than they are today. The limiting factor isn't humanity's knowledge. The limit is that barely anyone wants to pay the bill.
Do you even have any experience with how most companies work? SMEs barely have the cashflow to cover their daily expenses, let alone suddenly pay thousands for regular professional security audits and overhauls of their code. This is why security is an afterthought.
Security is always a cost center and rarely a profit center. That's the only thing that needs to be said.
If builders can't build houses to code, and the buildings fall down, they shouldn't be allowed to stay in business.
If civil engineers build bridges that fail. Or doctors hurt patients. Or police officers shoot innocent people, they shouldn't keep their jobs.
Software engineers are no different. If you collect my user data and it's at high risk of leaking on the dark web, either clean up your act or close shop.
That means designing the ecosystem pressures is crucial: things more meaningful than just pure capitalist private-profit logic must by enforced by thoughtful regulation or otherwise the ecosystem converges for private-profit of a small sliver of individuals (billionaires) to the detriment of all other ecosystem members (99% of the world population).
This holds for anything broader than pure private gain, may it be security, social fairness or ecological topics. Sole monetary-value optimization for private gain must be properly constrained or else it results in pure predatory capitalism that implodes society from within, may it be through leaky security, poisoned environments or social unrest.
You mean something is theoretically possible, but in practice only works at small scale and is otherwise effectively impossible. You only have so many resources for all those big topics.
And after you spent all the world's resources on the "perfect", formally bug-free software, you get hacked via social engineering or malicious insider.
But your evidence does not support that claim. SeL4 has proven that it is possible to design a secure microkernel and prove its security guarantees. It does not prove that you can build entire systems (filesystem+database+web server+browser) on top of that kernel while maintaining the same security guarantees.
I'm all for improving the state of computer security, and I'd love for capability systems like SeL4 to become more prevalent. But it's only a microkernel, and it's by no means certain that the PeopleSoft vulnerability exploited here required a kernel-level compromise.
Wasm does this. Erlang does this. SeL4 does this. Chrome is built this way. The windows driver model is moving this way. And so on. You want a solid core to build around - which is what SeL4 and beam try to be. Then it’s up to us to use those primitives and build good software. Combine that with a memory safe language (rust, go, c#, etc) to protect against buffer overruns and use after frees. And a picture starts to form of how you can build software that is a lot more secure by default.
I don’t think perfect security is worth the cost for many companies. But so many security leaks happen because of amateur hour somewhere. Bugs happen - I get that. But a single bug in a C++ program shouldn’t immediately lead to RCE with system level privileges. This stuff isn’t rocket science.
Oftentimes the weakest link is the human operator who has direct access to those systems, not the computer system itself. Good old social engineering, in other words.
Even though one could use LLMs for social engineering, come to think of it, like re-enacting the movie "Her" involving a modern AI as Scarlett Johansson and an engineer working for the water utility as the romantic target.
If that is the case, the computer security team have done their jobs.
I wish that were true more often.
> Of course there is.
A bit over-optimistic when looking at hardware vulneraribilties like Spectre/Meltdown. Software security isn't worth much when it runs on vulnerable hardware (at least Spectre/Meltdown could be worked around in software though).
You know that's their actual job right? That and fixing the problem. Which they did in both software and hardware.
Its not expensive because its niche, its expensive because its hard. Its a lot easier to learn a bit of html and javascript and knock up some web projects then it is to become proficient at all the things necessary to be good at security. Generally it also takes consulting with maths experts who have spent their life studying cryptography and as such command a decent wage.
It doesn't take a maths degree to look out for SQL injection attacks or to audit software & write up a risk assessment.
There wasn't.
Computer security is expensive but that expense has nothing to do with cryptography.
I'd counter and suggest it is expensive because almost nobody gives a damn about the first 3 layers in the OSI model, and have pushed most security responsibility up to layers 4-7. That's roughly half of your attack surface still exposed.
And one screw up, and it’s out.
But most important of all, the highest level - human operators - are not provable secure anyway. Any castle gate can be opened from inside - so why have the gate anyway? Security by absence is absolute
Followed up with a lot of “we just make the tool, we can’t be held responsible for how it’s used”.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/flock-ceo-asks-...
A linux box, layered in encryption and not plugged into any network = damb secure.
A network-connected linux box with a hardened OS, firewalled, acting only as a file server, given regular updates and 24/7 monitoring = less likely to be "hacked" than struck by lightning.
A hard drive with its power supply physically switched off = 100% secure from external attack.
Not a joke. The keys for editing the world's most important files, the root zone, are kept on no-power drives in air-gapped safes. They have yet to be hacked.
Most control still works this way. See the postmortem on the Iberia black start. Renewables that were trying to do frequency following drifted out of sync and injected misaligned power into the grid. They couldn't even figure out where it was coming from their telemetry is so bad. Then they were asking the gas plants to spin up to add inertia but it was too late as the boilers were cold. IT and other smart grid ideas were conspicuously absent.
Of course they do. Not everyone has the level of technical expertise the average HN user does. Turning around to them and saying “duh of course all your personal data leaked” doesn’t feel like a helpful response. Especially when they don’t even have control over where their data lives anyway.
Nobody I know in security hardening or vulnerability research has ever believed that anything is perfectly secure. It's not black and white. There are degrees to this.
I find this fatalistic thinking that every database should be assumed compromised to be subtly harmful. Everyone I know who thought that way waltzed right into lax security practices. "Good enough, what's the point, if anyone wants it bad enough they're going to get it anyway"
For every engineer that takes security seriously, there are 99 engineers that don’t. It’s an uphill battle.
Source: 25 years of experience.
There's a reason that many military and intelligence organizations worldwide physically cut / remove wifi and bluetooth chips from boards. The same is done when audio is identifiable, and specific hardware (only) greenlit.
I've lost hours of my life to calls explaining exactly this, only to have people ignore it, only to further have folks come back, tail between their legs. The worst part is learning this in industry, as I did. There's a reason for in-industry advisors. I wish that I had learned this the easy way.
The problem is, most water, sewage and even many electrical infrastructure isn't manned any more. You need some form of remote surveillance and control, and practically, you will need to go with some sort of VPN based network.
Depends how the house was build. Here in europe there are plenty of old houses build in areas that experienced periodic flooding - there the advice is simply, do not store anything critical in the basement.
If you have ${anything}, assume it is semi-public, meaning if someone was interested enough in accessing it, they could do it. "Fort Knox" isn't the right analogy for physical security; the primary question isn't whether something can be breach, but how much would it cost the attacker to do it.
A system where expected costs to attackers >> expected profit they could reasonably make from succeeding, is considered secure in typical case (exception: special cases where attackers may be driven by non-material reasons - think terrorism, politics).
Computer security is largely still stuck in "Fort Knox" thinking.
> For example, do not hook your goddamn water or traffic or electricity infrastructure up to the goddamn Internet, and then, do fire the guy who suggested it.
That ship has sailed. "Modern problems require modern solutions", that infrastructure will be in some way accessible over network is a necessity at this point, the question should be, how to keep it difficult for normal attackers to mess with it, without preventing the system from fulfilling its intended function.
> The correct analogy for computer security is not locks and keys and doors and gates. It is a house in a floodplain. Your house will not survive the flood of it hits you. Do not store anything critical or irreplaceable in that house.
The correct analogy for computer security is a house. Scale security proportionally to actual importance of what's inside, and accept that nonzero amount of houses will be broken into; that's just insurance writeoff. Leave the 20-meter walls with towers and armed guards and helicopter gunships on fast-dial for the critical junctions, while keeping in mind that this is not perfect either - it won't stop an open nation state attack, at best maybe slow it down.
For critical infrastructure, I'd honestly focus on redundancy, resiliency, limiting blast radius and procedures to recover quickly, over trying to turn every physical or virtual substation into unpenetrable fortress.
(Another thing physical security gets right, that cyber side seems to ignore: security does not and cannot exist in isolation; criminal justice system and law enforcement are part of it, and at extreme end, threat of military intervention against a state that aids and abets the perpetrators. The possibility of sending "men with guns" after perpetrators is core part of securing a system or space, it's literally what they are for and why we fund it with taxes.)
There is such thing but almost never a priority. In the corp I work leadership talks a lot about security but when comes to the incentives the road-map takes priority over the security. If you deliver fast you'll be promoted, if you're a paying attention to the security no-one will appreciate it and the manager will hate you for delaying delivery. Many managers I interact with see new features as the main value development teams should provide and security, reliability and other QoS as a waste to be minimised.
Another issue is that even if security will be a priority and managers will be on board (good lock changing the culture tough) we probably cannot build secure systems while keeping the insane level of complexity we have nowadays. Switching to simpler but secure system will require sacrifices in features/convenience.
That doesn't mean that all of your neighbors know your medical history, but you have to assume that someone who wants to know those details about you will know them.
I have lost faith in people protecting any significant database from hackers.
Most security professionals I've met in my career border on being non-technical, there are of course security researchers and a whole arcane and academic field that exists well beneath the surface but it is so far removed from the every-day.
I am more concerned about my cloud data being published in a leak.
But then on the other hand, if I use mainstream cloud services, a broad leak with no specific interest in my data would need to be exabytes in size and would take years to transfer even with a 100 Gbps connection.
Ask the Iranians how impenetrable even physical isolation actually is - their centrifuges were still destroyed even though they were air gapped (the infamous Stuxnet). Ultimately all computerized systems are vulnerable to sufficiently determined cyber-adversaries.
You also need to make various cost-benefit analysis decisions for all of these things. Does the extra security you gain by keeping your system disconnected from the Internet actually increase all-around availability and resilience?
In particular, integrating highly variable power sources like solar and wind into the grid requires much more complex synchronization between producers, storage, and consumers in order to function properly. Trying to build a renewable grid without Internet access is doomed to extremely inefficient, if possible at all. Building an alternate network would be extremely expensive and ultimately useless (since every house in the country needs to connect to it, it would be just as vulnerable as the actual Internet anyway). So, ultimately you must connect your power grid to the Internet to actually provide service, despite the security risks.
Perhaps the situation with the water supply or traffic is different, so maybe this is not as applicable.
There were only two VM escapes from Qubes OS in the last 20 years [0]. How is this not sufficiently secure?
https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/qsb-116-multiple-xen-issues-xsa...
CHC is the largest claims clearinghouse in the US; about 100m people's insurance claims go through there each year.
The hackers asked for a ransom ($35m iirc) to delete the data, which United Healthcare (who owns them, because of course they do) paid. But it seems that the collective negotiating on behalf of the actual hackers rug pulled, so the actual hackers didn't get paid.
This is more than simply medical records. It includes who is active duty military and their family. If you can map where soldiers are, you know roughly the size of different military bases. If you know which types of capabilities are operated out of which bases, you can get a pretty good look of how the US is allocating personnel.
It was crazy working on recovery from this at the time. It should have been front page news, but wasn't.
[0] Everyone gets hacked, but not everyone has all of their most secure data exfiltrated.
If somebody wants data about me, they can write the query, I'll approve it, and it can hit a server designated by me and run by somebody I know personally.
It's not just a privacy/security concern. People who get too close to large piles of sensitive data tend to start behaving poorly in other ways too--they might be compelled to misrepresent it. Apparently the forces of corruption are too great. Maybe the way to avoid exposing each other to such hazards is to just maintain smaller piles of data, closer to the people that the data is about.
Also, it's a lot harder to phish somebody who is on a first name basis with 100% of their users. It's not enough to merely have a plausible backstory, you have to impersonate one of their friends.
Of course you can still hack through whatever protocol indexes them and multiplexes queries across them, but now you're presenting a much smaller and easier to defend attack surface.
I think privacy will remain, perhaps even improve, because people are much less inclined to snoop when it cannot be done covertly. No secrecy means no covert activity.
Information is everywhere and with the increasing ability to analyse it, not only does it enable access to explicit information, but the ability to infer from increasing volumes of data that will make it hard to hide anything.
Spectre reads protected memory by tiny vriarions in timing. You can now measure the pulse of people from film. You can recover audio from a room by analysing frames of a video recording of a chip packet taken with mobile phone camera.
This kind of data residue is everywhere, collecting only what is publicly available can probably tell you more than you could hope to know about anything that happens. The only thing preventing it is the ability to consider it all together. Those walls are swiftly crumbling.
I'm not just talking about bids. The idea presets itself prolifically. We all work in tech, I'm sure you see it on a daily basis. Rush Rush, no time to think, just do it. 6mo later, "there's so much shit! How could we have ever prevented this?" Rinse, lather, repeat
It’s entirely possible to keep large databases secure. It takes competence and commitment though, something federal police don’t have for IT.
Wondering about pets..
https://youtube.com/shorts/BTNmtMB2Pyw?is=K05pyS9GdrS7O3WR
I didn't really know passive bestiality was a problem, I thought you're a victim then. (Apart from the obvious fact you're then an ... animal.)
Qilin allegedly hacked BATFE about a month ago, and the files were never posted to their site.
Every day 2 major organizations get hacked, whether by groups or state actors, and America continues to sit on its hands.
The government should be creating a new digital defense department to better defend our country, and fund the defense of our nation, but instead it is busy renaming lakes and renaming "AI".
Almost like its run by a bunch of 80 year olds...
That's lot of data for a list of employees.
1980 called and wanted its terminology back.
Oracle enterprise applications are a gold mine for attackers precisely because nobody treats them as security-critical systems.
In 2025 the Clop ransomware gang discovered that Oracle E-Business Suite has a critical vulnerability (CVE-2025-61882) that allows unauthenticated remote code execution.
Graceful Spider (tracked as Clop affiliates) started exploiting this in early August, well before Oracle issued a patch in October. That’s a two-month window where attackers had free rein.
All you need to know about Clop is that they got fucked by SH as well just a few days ago.
ShinyHunters defaced Clop's Tor leak site and added its own branding and messages. SH claims it stole source code, system logs, plugins, and Tor onion service keys. SH says it plans to give Clop 72 hours to respond to an extortion message.
Say what you want but these kids got balls. Won’t help them once SOCOM starts dealing with them, but they had a good run so far. I think hacking the FBI is as close as you can fly to the sun before the hammer drops.
In February this year they breached Wynn Resorts and lifted data on 800,000-plus employees. Can you guess the entry point?
If you guessed Oracle PeopleSoft, you were right.
Now you’d think the FBI IT people would have noticed that oracle software is a potential national security risk, if multiple ransomware groups keep focusing specifically on the shit Larry Elison personally have to seem vibe coded, over and over.
But Ka$h replaced most of the competent people at the FBI with Ka$h people and by pure luck Oracle won a $396m HR government contract this summer. Who wouldn’t want to supply the most secure software product to manage some of the most sensitive data within the agency, if not the Oracle Moscow branch.
https://mesoclever.com/2026/06/11/oracle-wins-396m-hr-contra...
They even mentioned in the above June article:
> Separately, the cybercrime group ShinyHunters claimed to have exfiltrated student, financial-aid, immigration, health, and administrative records from PeopleSoft instances at more than 100 organizations, predominantly universities. The group stated it had previously targeted an *FBI PeopleSoft server* before pivoting to educational institutions already compromised in earlier campaigns. Oracle has not publicly confirmed the scope or remediation status of these incidents.
So the FBI knew, and had it coming, and if stuff like this happens, THE HEAD needs to roll. And all of his buddies in IT should permanently get to spend their time outside the government at the seafood buffet at Ka$hs favorite gentleman’s club as well.
Fookin Big Idiots.
(Right, you quote it. It seems almost unrealistic, like the script writers in an absurd story have planted it into supposedly past article)
The US seems to breed this particular 'set' with remarkable consistency.
The choice is play ball with the USG, or be dead in the water. Once you’re large enough, simply abiding by the laws is insufficient to remain unmolested - you must actively play ball or you’ll find that suddenly a TON of regulations now apply to you that didn’t before.
Do you think Apple or SpaceX like dealing with the NSA/CSS/CIA? Or the CCP for that matter? (Apple has backdoored all of iCloud in China for the CCP to be allowed to operate there.) Coinbase and the IRS is one. All the telcos turn over all call metadata and IP backbone taps to the feds without a warrant. Google Joseph Nacchio to see what happens if they don’t.
They’re the only game in town, and you gotta play by their rules if you want to operate at scale at all. No amount of billions of private money will get Trump and his administration un-pissed-off at you.
It’s not a free market, all large industries entirely serve exclusively at the pleasure of the court. This is why we overpay for broadband in every major market, why we overpay for mobile data nationwide, why retail banking sucks, etc.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cje3rezd92y3o
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_the_United_...
And the boycott is to deliberately inflict a narcissistic injury to Trump. His attempt to create a state-owned news outlet is an attempt to reduce/minimize that injury. Personally, I think the best defense by the media would be to display his senile rambling conversations - show everyone how insane his actual words are.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissistic_injury
From Trump's first political strategist in 2018:
> "The Democrats don't matter... The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_the_zone
> For Ur-Fascism, disagreement is treason.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ur-Fascism
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/umberto-eco-ur-fasci...
OK, so that completely contradicts your statement that they do "everything they can to appease the orange guy".
I don't know what percentage of their articles were behind one then, or how that might've changed between then and now. (Well, except for the fact that clearly some of their stuff is public today since we're looking at it.)
If I had my 'druthers "paywall" and "register-wall" would be little icons on the submissions, and then people would choose whether to upvote the more-accessible source, whether the hard-to-read stuff was still important enough to comment on, etc.
If it's completely paywalled with no other archived link to post, then that specific HN post gets [dead].
By comparison, the likes of the Verge only run the most mainstream kind of articles. There is no deep, technical analysis of any complex topic. The most technical stuff they post may be those benchmarks they run for laptops. And they certainly don't file for FOIA despite how much (negative) coverage they do for US government agencies -- they leave the hard work to others.
(A quick Google search will confirm all of above.)
1992 was 33 years ago; this is almost an unremarkable event. It will be superseded by whatever happens in AI news by the end of the month.