back to article US military battling cyber threats from within and without

The US government is fighting a pair of cyber security incidents, one involving Chinese spies who potentially gained access to crucial American computer networks and the other related to an Air Force engineer allegedly compromised communications security by stealing sensitive equipment and taking it home. Over the weekend it …

  1. Flak
    Holmes

    Statistically inevitable

    Any organisation that goes beyond a very small, trusted circle will (eventually) have bad actors in it and therefore needs to prepare for and defend against this.

    Anyone working in a cyber security environment will tell you it is not a question of 'if', but 'when' a system is successfully compromised.

    1. Valeyard

      Re: Statistically inevitable

      Try telling that to commercial orgs.

      You report a security issue with your software product, only for the response to be "Well that's obscure no one will know about that", well yeah except everyone with access to our code and we've already had our fair share of disgruntled ex-employees who've targeted systems using insider knowledge. But a fancy chart no clients asked for is higher priority for our time because sales people have some new shiny thing to point at.

    2. Dr Dan Holdsworth
      WTF?

      Re: Statistically inevitable

      Yes, but if you've a techie who already seems to be going off the rails and who is racking up both disciplinary problems and other red flags, then why hasn't this potentially hostile actor had his access to secret stuff revoked?

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Statistically inevitable

      Explaining to my boss that I had found something incorrectly configured on our OneDrive/Sharepoint/MS etc. I was given the brush off. So I got hold of our Data Protection Officer who also happens to be a board director of the company. Explained it to him and told him I didn’t want to be the source for this discovery please. He told me he’d claim to have found it if asked and then had it fixed.

      Anon, well you can guess why

  2. Andy The Hat Silver badge

    reasons for not releasing a suspect on bail

    "he asked a judge to release him, arguing that he's charged with the same federal counts as former president Donald Trump, who remains at large."

    but he will merge into and get lost in the general population, a big, orange, self-opinionated wazzock may be easier to find ...

    I presume Trumps "wanted" poster would just be a square cut out of a 1970's paint colour chart?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: reasons for not releasing a suspect on bail

      If they put Trump in an orange convict jumpsuit he’ll just become an almost seamless orange blob with a a crop of thin wispy hair at the top.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Terminator

    The Internet Is No Place for Critical Infrastructure (2013)

    Dan Geer: Risk is a necessary consequence of dependence

  4. Grinning Bandicoot
    Holmes

    Classification games (or don't tell about the peanut butter)

    The security classification is as low as it can go and why classified? The frequencies are on the market in various hobby magazines. The DES codes should at the minimum be changed daily with the master key secured at SECRET or above.

    This again shows the problems with classification of technical material. I've always tried to keep what was learned outside from that on the job; BUT, when the advertisement in a trade journal gives a more clear and concise explanation of something than the classified manual a problem of validity of such classification process is in the face

  5. GloriousVictoryForThePeople

    ... Beijing has buried malicious code in computer networks controlling water supplies,...

    Nowhere is safe from the yellow devils.

    Soon it won't even be safe to drink the water in Flint.

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