The Ruskies are coming for you, NSA director tells City bankers

Defence bigwigs have issued a stern warning to financial companies at the London Stock Exchange that "so-called patriotic hacker groups" may soon embiggen their attacks on the City and Wall Street. The talk, organised by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) along with the FCA and Bank of England, noted how Western banks …

[Anonymous Coward]

The head of the NSA acknowledged the strong maturity of the financial sector in dealing with cybercrime, but extending such practices to the middle and lower levels of the industry is difficult when those companies do not have the resources or the expertise to ensure their systems are secure.

Is that maturity in being shafted? Or maturity in denying it? Or maturity in absolving themselves of any loss? Just curious

[Phuq Witt]

Russians Are Coming?

"...Royal United Services Institute (RUSI)..."

Well, that acronym sounds suspicious for a start.

[Anonymous Coward]

secure?

"we plunged into a system of systems that was never designed to be secure."

You mean the military designed and built Darpanet, designed to survive nuclear war, was never designed to be secure? are you completely sure about that?

[Paul Crawford]

Re: secure?

Oh the internet is secure.

But once we started with routers/switches attached and "protecting" our interests that have more lines of code for poxy user interfaces than most 70's operating systems had, and then hooked up PCs designed so an idiot could get on-line to browse pr0n, then you have a security problem...

[LucreLout]

Re: secure?

@Paul Crawford

and then hooked up PCs designed so an idiot could get on-line to browse pr0n

Wow. I'm flattered that you went to all that trouble just for little old me.

[tom dial]

Re: secure?

The Arpanet was designed to be resilient in the face of physical disruption, but not particularly to protect the content of communication it was used to transfer. The goal was to ensure deliverability. For data protection there were, and are, other measures like encryption that go back centuries in time, as do the problems with ensuring message integrity and privacy. Both goals have associated difficulties.

[Anonymous Coward]

the solution is simple

"The head of the NSA acknowledged the strong maturity of the financial sector in dealing with cybercrime, but extending such practices to the middle and lower levels of the industry is difficult when those companies do not have the resources or the expertise to ensure their systems are secure. ®"

What if we stopped using encryption? would that help?

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: the solution is simple

No, we need to ban encryption AND hoard zero day exploits - it's the only way to be sure.

[Will Godfrey]

Highly skilled people

Had to be to come out with all that, and not break up in a fit of giggles.

[Anonymous Coward]

you must prepare for and assume that you will be penetrated.

is he talking to business or the general public?

[Graham Marsden]

Just bend over...

... whilst they put on the rubber gloves...

[Chris G]

"you must prepare for and assume that you have been penetrated."

" And we may not be the worst you will encounter"

FIFY Admirdribble!

[amanfromMars 1]

Stating the Bleeding Obvious to the Wilfully Oblivious ....... or Delusionally Devious?

Defending the indefensible is a folly for fools, Sir David/Admiral Rogers. What excuses do you proffer?

[Nolveys]

Admiral Rogers offered a grim warning: "We're in a world now where despite your best efforts, you must prepare for and assume that you will be penetrated."

That wouldn't be "Rear Admiral Rogers", would it?

[Gene Cash]

Chase & .ru

When I log into Chase on this side of the pond, I see an absolute assload of ad cookies (nearly 3 dozen) including several .ru domains. Gives me the warm and fuzzy, it does...

[Destroy All Monsters]

Ah ahahaha!

So it is a race against time for COMRADERIE and GLORY for the Russians as "Wall Street" and "The City" could messily implode at any moment, with problems ranging from shitty software written by overpaid web developers, dangerous feedback loops everywhere, addiction to free money injections directly from the printing press, valuations with no relation to the economic fundamentals and debt abysses never seen before.

and about this....

And that gets to the real truth about the Wall Street bubblies which were flowing last Friday. Morgan Stanley’s chief equity strategist, like the rest of the sell-side stock peddlers, has it exactly upside down; and the proof of the pudding in this instance lies is in Morgan Stanley’s own “New Tech” index of 16 high flyers of the present era.

This charmed circle includes Google, Amazon, Baidu, Facebook, Saleforce.com, Netflix, Pandora, Tesla, LinkedIn, ServiceNow, Splunk, Workday, Ylep, Priceline, QLIK Technologies and Yandex. Taken altogether, their market cap clocked in at $1.3 trillion on Friday. That compares to just $21 billion of LTM net income for the entire index combined.

The talking heads, of course, would urge not to be troubled. After all, what’s a 61X trailing PE among today’s leading tech growth companies?

As it happens, quite a bit. When you take GOOG’s middle-aged profits machine out of the mix, you get something altogether more frisky. Namely, a collective market cap of $840 billion for the other 15 names in the Morgan Stanley index and LTM net income of exactly $6.0 billion.

As we said at the top—-let’s see. That’s a PE multiple of 140X. That’s February 2000 all over again.

Take cover. The Wall Street bubblies are back!

I reckon the Russians will lose.

[Tail Up]

Notification To Participant

Patriotic hacker - is it a Rogerism, or have I missed something?

"I know from my own experience how deep the transatlantic intelligence relationship goes – and how mutually productive it's been over very many years" - yes, Mr. Rogers, more and more people acquire the same experience, with a transpacific bonus, but don't we forget the sp00ky secret that real actionable intelligence is global, as well as nowadays patriotism is (told once to FSB Colonel that I don't really like this word). Global, stop. Money for the Mankind, not vice versa.

But the banking system that Sir Admiral Rogers is hereby trying to lay as a cornerstone of the Order is in fact split and alien and concurrent to itself and is no more able to assist the human progress, becoming a ponzi in company with the participants of the "modern" political system, which, in fact, came not too far from the Pharaos. Its parts don't even care about its host nations, otherwise the banking system would completely change the very idea of paper currencies and electronic zeroes and ones from the weapon of enslavement into the noble working tool of most common well-being in a society void of consumption rush.

Further addressed personally.

Mr. Rogers, as far as one can understand from the incoming streams, the scheduled institutions within the US jurisdiction are taking part in financing the scheme of the combat escalation against Russian military forces and the people of the country. After you perform your fact-checking, I hope you'll agree that some preventive countermeasures against said institutions will be just, WILL YOU?

Just hold those greedy f*cksters, Mr. Rogers, or leave the seat. You're not the first who hears this.

When will them bloodsuckers blow up already? Pinpointed, not like this - https://youtu.be/KJLe8LL0Rf8

Sator

Arepo

Tenet

Opera

Rotas

73

[Kane]

"We're in a world now where despite your best efforts, you must prepare for and assume that you will be penetrated."

In other words...

[Anonymous Coward]

How long have the sanctions being happening?

And we haven't seen this yet.

Methinks that some spooks are kicking up dust to further deprive their citizens of what few rights they have.

[s5PGmU]

The Ruskies are coming for you...

unless the NSA gets you first.

[Anonymous Coward]

"a possible result of increased sanctions against Russia over its behaviour "in Crimea and Ukraine, I would expect so-called patriotic hacker groups to attack Wall Street and the City in return." although Russia is free to abduct Estonian military / police, and Russian computers can launch widespread attacks against that country, without NATO countries doing anything effective at all, or generating stories like this ... what are they not mentioning?

[amanfromMars 1]

East vs West ... and the Great North/South Divide .... In Mined Mind Games with SMARTR APT ACTors

"a possible result of increased sanctions against Russia over its behaviour "in Crimea and Ukraine, I would expect so-called patriotic hacker groups to attack Wall Street and the City in return." although Russia is free to abduct Estonian military / police, and Russian computers can launch widespread attacks against that country, without NATO countries doing anything effective at all, or generating stories like this ... what are they not mentioning? ..... Anonymous Coward

Generating stories like those are what IT is all about in Command and Control of the Great Game and in the fields in which IT works is studiously hardly ever mentioned mainstream.

[cantankerous swineherd]

why worry? UK gov are installing "smart" meters accessible ota, thereby allowing the patriotic hackers to effectively nuke the country.

no banks = a nuisance, but can always use ciggies or something instead of money. no leccy = oh er missus.

[amanfromMars 1]

The Weather Underground Changing Universal Climates/Global Perceptions/Media Tales

It is not banks per se which are the politically incorrect nuisance and problem for eradication but the present crop of elitist bankers and their hierarchical defenders, cantankerous swineherd.

And solutions are works in anonymous autonomous progress? ....... http://www.rt.com/op-edge/310290-occupy-london-extremism-uk/

[LucreLout]

Dear Sir David Omand

My reading of your message to the City is "Beware: The Russians are coming".

I feel it only prudent to inform you that you are about 15 years too late: The Russians are already here, along with the Chinese, the Indians, the Koreans, and the Argentinians, and that is just on my desk.

They're already behind the firewall, already have escalated privileges, and already understand our systems - they wrote several of them! In the event of outright war with their home nations, they could readily become what used to be termed "the enemy within", and there is no credible defence against them.

The reality is that the only way to protect systems in the UK from attack by foreign nations in times of war is to not employ their nationals in times of peace, and that, put simply, is just not realistic.

Systems security absolutely must be taken seriously, far more so than it is today. My systems guys don't stand a chance against the lack of secure computing knowledge in the development teams.

Perhaps we should regulate who is allowed to build systems for the City, and other important but apparantly not critical infrastructure? We could, you know, have an industry regulator to determine who can code/admin/other to sufficient standards that they are allowed to practice the profession?

[amanfromMars 1]

Dear Sir David et al, Get with IT or Die Trying to Defeat the Virtually Realistic and Unstoppable.

That clarion call with clarity deserves an up vote, LucreLout, but don't be expecting any of the greater and greatest coders to be thinking about working for crumbling systems operations ..... Ponzi SCADA Admins.

They aint anybody's fools for top gun hire.

[LucreLout]

Re: Dear Sir David

don't be expecting any of the greater and greatest coders to be thinking about working for crumbling systems operations

Perhaps an example to illustrate what I meant as I am often not as clear as I'd like....

Take a trade capture system. Lets run that on an extremely locked down and secured set of servers on a well monitored and secured network. Now lets realise that the coder that built the system wasn't too clever and is accidentally, in ignorange, broadcasting those trades to anyone behind the firewall that cares to listen, and worse still the inbound sink isn't secured.

The data leaks. The data is corruptable. None of that is the sysadmins fault, and none of it is within their gift to fix. That is a real life situation I previously encountered and remedied. Developers; We're a risk.

Now lets suppose I was Russian and the bank was British and the nations were at war... Looking outside the firewall or relying on intrusion detection is really missing the bigger picture, which was my message to Sir Dave.

[amanfromMars 1]

Re: Dear Sir David

Quite so, LucreLout. Every cloud has lucrative opportunities to exploit and export with precious little risk of discovery in the complex coding space that is the virtual market place, and especially so whenever one is being creative and constructive rather than destructive and disruptive and playing Great Games by traditional rules with punitive regulations.

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me summarise the whole affair in one sentence..

.. we need more money to spy on people.

See? That wasn't so hard now, was it? Granted, it's a tad more honest and less grand than guzzling champagne with the people you try to scare into handing over money, but it has the benefit of being simple and true. You see, your lot has cried so often either "WOLF!!" or "the sky is falling" that listeners are starting to suffer a certain alarm fatigue, so maybe it's time to be a tad more honest.

I know that's hard for you, but just give it a try?

[Tail Up]

Re: Let me summarise the whole affair in one sentence..

@ "WOLF!" - as they mature, they got to know more names of the predatory animals. Bear, tiger, shark, etc., and they will always success in finding a free ear.

[Tubz]

transatlantic intelligence relationship is mutually productive over the years and the relationship is now flourishing in cyberspace. Yeh GCHQ doing all the NSA's dirty work to avoid US laws, while breaking most of the UK's, and UK powers that be covering up !!

[Anonymous Coward]

Optional

What if they're doing the work that others have just crapped up?