Posted on 11/20/2008 4:43:58 PM PST by Sammy67
Edited on 11/20/2008 4:48:23 PM PST by Admin Moderator. [history]
Thursday, November 20, 2008 The Pentagon has suffered from a cyber attack so alarming that it has taken the unprecedented step of banning the use of external hardware devices, such as flash drives and DVD's, FOX News has learned.
The attack came in the form of a global virus or worm that is spreading rapidly throughout a number of military networks.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
Liberty:
I think you’re right. The world is very much in an appeasement phase, what with Iran’s announcement of having enough enriched uranium. Will anyone fight? The world has entered a global recession, an evil menace is arising, and the world is inclined toward appeasement and peace. Sounds like the early 1903s. Except this time instead of Roosevelt, a man willing to fight, we have an empty suit who thinks that national priorities are healthcare (no one is dying in the streets), college affordability (no lack of students in college these days), gay rights, etc. Roosevelt has socialistic and collectivistic leanings but at least he wasn’t afraid to kick butt.
I attended a prominent private university many years ago and most of my college buddies are liberal. I was shocked when, immediately after 9-11, many of them told me they were glad that Bush won instead of Gore. I think that if global war erupts there will be many middle America voters who will wish that McCain had won.
>>All new computers are loaded with Vista.<<
Ugh. Which by default has IE with ActiveX enabled, unfortunately. Javascript is bad enough.
But, unless you have seen all of their computers, you can’t know what all of them are running, and I would be surprised if some of the servers are not running some form of UNIX.
Hmmmmm. OK. It's just as hackable as a system that now has upwards of 500,000 known malware... but it has only 8 known trojans that require the complicity of the user to invade the system, and zero self-replicating, self-transmitting viruses, and zero spyware. Nine years of OS X and counting and still no need to run anti-virus, anti-spyware, or any other protective applications.
Just exactly what is the magic number when the Mac becomes popular enough to attract thieves and hackers? Is 10,000,000 enough? How about 20,000,000?
The Witty Worm was written by hackers to exploit a vulnerability in just 10,000 Black Ice firewall protected Windows PCs... and infected every single one of them within 45 minutes of being released in the wild.
A Spam-bot of just a few hundred or a few thousand Windows PCs is a very useful and valuable construct... yet there are ZERO Mac spam-bots sending out spam. Why is that?
There are now over 32 million OS X Macs in the world—surveys have shown that Mac owners are more prosperous and have more disposable dollars than PC users—yet the thieves are not going after them?99% of those Mac users are unprotected by anti-virus or anti-spy applications, yet they are NOT being successfully attacked by the thieves and hackers of the world. I would think they would be considered sitting ducks. Why aren't Macs being exploited left and right? Why aren't there thousands of Mac Spam Bots?
It certainly is not due to security by obscurity.
Whatever this thing is, it cannot be any worse than the Navy / Marine Corp Intranet, aka NMCI. The NMCI is a humongous, costly, self-inflicted Denial of Service attack. It demonstrates that even in DoD we learned nothing from the failures of Soviet style centralization.
By the way: the productive use of removable media in the unclassified environment will always far outweigh the risks coming from these devices. The command to ban removable devices is an unnecessary spasm illustrating DoD ineptness in building a reliable network infrastructure, particularly on NMCI. The ChiComs, or whomever, managed to introduce a bug in our systems. Our own flag officers and SESers multiplied this annoyance many fold with the ban on removable devices. Our enemies say thank you very much.
People can rationalize old versions of OSX all day long. They lost my organization as a customer and will never get us back. We switched to PCs with Win XP and haven’t had 1/100th of the problems. We were stupid enough to flirt with it once and it cost us a lot of money to get out from under the Macintrash. The computers were fine, it was the OS that sucked. Really sucked, to the point of drawing vacuum. The IT contractor made a small fortune off of us and any lead that suggests that we try it again is begging to be fired.
I don’t doubt that DoD could stay with Win XP, but they’re not. They’re going full speed ahead for Vista. I can’t speak for Vista having never even seen it, but I can’t find anybody who has anything good to say about it. #1 complaint: it’s a compatability nightmare.
Yep, that was it. Toward the end of that mess, someone with a big address book would have a mental lapse and click on one of them. They’d get angry phone calls from all over the world.
And I look at Windows XP (pre service pack) as an indicator of the state of the art in Windows today. Actually, the point is that an OS should advance the state of the art with every release. Vista took a step back on the whole. OS X has been advancing rapidly since its inception.
So far every release has been faster on the same compatible hardware while adding features. In fact, Apple is using this whole next release cycle for performance, security, development, compatibility and stability improvements (no new major user-facing features). It is ahead of Windows in pretty much every way.
Sounds like you also got a crappy contractor though.
They’re going full speed ahead for Vista.
I see DoD Windows machines often and know a lot of people who work with vast amounts of them daily, and they are all on XP on the client, 2003 on the server. There may be some DoD Vista machines out there, but they are relatively very few in number. They might even skip a Windows version and go straight to 7 for wide adoption.
Bill Ayers got a computer?
This is why he could not pass the background check.
External hardware devices like DVDs?!?!
Can anyone tell me how you plug a DVD into a USB port?
I really hope that the pentagon wakes up and looks at the software/architecture they’re relying upon and the people they’ve put in charge of their systems instead of just going after people with usb keys. Just going by the story, this sounds like a typically bureaucratic CYA response. They should be lucky that their enemies launched a trial strike on them instead of in the middle of a war.
That is very interesting! You mean you believe they are moving to Apple for security reasons, not just purely IT reasons?
Hmmmm. Makes me wonder at times how good some of the IT folks really are. FWIW, I am now qualified as a GS-2210.
“...the unprecedented step of banning the use of external hardware devices, such as flash drives and DVD’s...”
If this is considered “unprecendented,” the Pentagon needs a new security department. Not bringing in outside hardware and software is a standard practice in the real world.
I’ve been trying to read up on the particulars of the apparent threat, so as to assess what risk we might have here at FR.
I suspect a fair number of FReepers have dayjobs associated with the government, some as contractors and / or military who fairly frequently use flash drives and cards or external USB devices.
So if the gov’t systems are threatened by such devices, what keeps other network links from being similarly at risk? Hence, wouldn’t FR also be at risk? Or minimally, what keeps those in the military who own PCs from having their PCs now infected from such a threat?
IMHO, the issue manifests command and control tendencies of the military. The US used to have an outstanding system of centralized command, decentralized control. Socialism tends to migrate in the opposite direction of decentralized command, with centralized control.
Users in a decentralized fashion are able to identify the situation as it arises, then take action with resources they control. Socialism tends to require the situation be communicated back to a centralized decision maker prior to releasing resources to solve a problem.
In the USB removal policy, we effectively remove resources from the local level and constrain all local action to using only resources from centralized strict control.
All an enemy now has to to then do is focus on communication to inhibit the defense machine from operating.
The internet was intended to provide an exponentially expandable network of alternate paths, thereby reducing the risk of lines of communication being interrupted in an attack.
That’s easy to say, but very costly to implement. Enormous training and communication costs are reduced by using standard software packages. MS Office, Adobe Acrobat, .jpg and AutoCAD have helped immensely as common formats in engineering circles.
At least we aren’t arguing over ASCII vs EBCDIC.
Right. No cracker wants to be famous as the first guy to write a self-replicating, self-transmitting virus that breeched the vaunted and well known imperviousness of Mac OS X; he'd rather be just one of the hundreds of thousands of "me too"s who have easily assailed the ramparts of Windows and remain lost in the crowd.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.