Posts by egrep 10 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Mar 2024
This could have happened to literally any organization that operates the way CrowdStrike does, testing in production.
But first testing in production is never considered best practice. Amato and the article's author accept CrowdStrike's PR statement at face value, not realizing how they operate is more like a move-fast-and-break-things startup than an enterprise. An enterprise operating like a startup isn't the flex that people think it is. It means there is a lot of tech debt.
It is very unlikely that school administration independently imagined, "I want to spend school funds on something that sounds expensive and futuristic like facial recognition technology" and tried to find a supplier to match these requirements. What probably happened was that a facial recognition tech company sold the idea to the school admin, and the admin lacked critical thinking skills and technical understanding to reject it.
Retaliation at work means something specific: 'A manager may not fire, demote, harass or otherwise "retaliate" against an individual for filing a complaint of discrimination, participating in a discrimination proceeding, or otherwise opposing discrimination.'
https://www.eeoc.gov/retaliation-making-it-personal
> Every election we've had in the last 14 years has had an undercurrent of Russian interference. Russia are hacking this. Russia are hacking that. Now it's China doing it? Have Russia gotten bored of us is that it?
Both have been active for years, and are called Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_persistent_threat . The article is about APT31 aka Zirconium, funded by the government of China, which has been active since 2017. https://attack.mitre.org/groups/G0128/
Here is 2020 Microsoft article about this group https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2020/09/10/cyberattacks-us-elections-trump-biden/ :
"Zirconium, operating from China, has attempted to gain intelligence on organizations associated with the upcoming U.S. presidential election. We’ve detected thousands of attacks from Zirconium between March 2020 and September 2020 resulting in nearly 150 compromises. Its targets have included individuals in two categories.
"First, the group is targeting people closely associated with U.S. presidential campaigns and candidates. For example, it appears to have indirectly and unsuccessfully targeted the Joe Biden for President campaign through non-campaign email accounts belonging to people affiliated with the campaign. The group has also targeted at least one prominent individual formerly associated with the Trump Administration.
"Second, the group is targeting prominent individuals in the international affairs community, academics in international affairs from more than 15 universities, and accounts tied to 18 international affairs and policy organizations including the Atlantic Council and the Stimson Center."
A news report on APT31/Zirconium does not imply that Russian or other APTs stopped activity.
1. People who speak a Mandarin as second language poorly would have thick accents distinctive of their first language, just like those who speak English as a second language poorly. English-accented Mandarin would not be confused with North-Korean-accented Mandarin.
2. This statement explains that the UN study was conducted with the help of native Mandarin speakers in China. It is not meant to be a protip on how you can avoid NK restaurants.
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