Never mind Russia: Turkey and Vietnam are Microsoft's new state-backed hacker threats du jour Iran, Turkey and both North and South Korea are bases for nation-state cyber attacks, Microsoft has claimed – as well as old favourite Russia. While more than half of cyberattacks spotted by Redmond came from Russia, of more interest to the wider world is information from the US megacorp's annual Digital Defence Report about …
Apparently October is cyber month!
So corporate It have sent out more security training with their normal inimitable style.
An email to everyone with a bit.ly link to some training video telling you not to click on random links
It did contain useful information about passwords, "horsebatterystaple" instead of Password123 for example.
Now we all have to change password, but the rules are max 16 chars, upper+lower+symbol+number !
And the disabled pin login, the thing that Microsoft introduced so you didn't enter your password 20 times a day precisely so you could have a more secure password.
And we have 2fa, which means having the Microsoft 2fa app on your phone, which they don't provide, but must be unrooted and you have to give IT the ability to manage the device in order to run the 2fa app.
And somehow it needs a new 2fa when you open outlook, then teams, then office365, then onedrive.....
If I worked for a company who wanted to get access to my phone, root it and install an app on it for 2FA, they would have to provide a phone to do it on.
My last employer before I retired, wanted me to install whatsapp on my phone, I said no so they gave me a cheap no name smartphone that I discovered had a tracking app on it, disabled the app, lost the phone twice and dropped it in the sea while working on the boss's yacht.
They didn't bother with a replacement.
We're all in the IT game in one way or another but sometimes some of us need reminding about a few things.
One is that IPv4 addresses aren't a reliable guide to a person's identity or location. You can make some guesses based on what organization an address is assigned to but addresses are so easy to spoof that anyone needing to disguise their true location can easily do so.
Another is that you just can't tie a group -- "Russians", say -- to an individual "Russian". Our politicians do this all the time because that's what they do. We should know better; you can't make accurate deductions about a group of 150 million from the actions of an individual. (Same with "Chinese" -- there's billions of them and, no, they're not all alike.)
Another is that any sophisticated hacking operation should be both hiding its tracks and possibly planting a trail of misleading information. It might also have reverse tracking information in it to figure out whether the code's been discovered and if so by whom.
(Turkey and Vietnam may have taken over from Russia simply because the Russian government has decided to take action against domestic hackers because of the bad press they're getting. The people responsible are not likely to be physically present in any one location.)
Does Uncle Sam Associates see everybody as an enemy destroying them and something to generate fleet of foot perverse interest for the creation of dollars for the spending and trashing and abandoning of home blood and treasure with global attacks on foreign civilian and alien paramilitary defences?
Are there any pills/drugs cocktails available to prevent that illness taking over mad control of the host and becoming a Despised and Despotic Universal Pariah?
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