Posts by pc-fluesterer.info 144 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Feb 2020
Yes, you could make life easy and blame attacks on not employing MFA.
But if you use network gear riddled with backdoors for the three-letter-agencies, you are lost. Anyone remember the US-Telcos case?
The only fundamental solution is the migration to FOSS on all levels from network gear to the back office servers.
Denmark and Estonia both have built their Civil Services completely on FOSS. Ransomware attacks are plain unknown.
So, what ramifications will follow?
None, of course.
Perhaps a bit of user training, because a user was the culprit, no?
But I bet that they will continue using M$ and other closed-source sh.t, buggy and riddled with backdoors.
Consider migration to FOSS? Oh, nooo!
Before that could happen the hell freezes over.
Oh well.
In Germany we have a Tenant Association (Mieterbund) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutscher_Mieterbund which fights for the concerns of tenants. OTOH they too are unable to achieve substantial improvements against adversaries like Vonovia (Annington). -
For organizing informally I would recommend a group in Signal.
Nice talk about foreign gear. But what about US? Cisco, Citrix and the rest of the gang? They are riddled with backdoors as well. "Forgotten" hardcoded admin credentials and the like. Remember: the Chinese attacks against US telcos exploited backdoors in place for the government.
There is no "good" backdoor!
Proprietary (closed-source) products cannot be trusted, regardless of their origin.
The only tolerably secure solution is FOSS. And even that has limitations as we all know.
Ransomware to 90% is not enabled by security holes in the sense of programming errors. Ransomware is enabled by design faults deep in M$' thinking. Most of ransomware comes with SPAM an the user has to contribute:
Open the SPAM (ok, take that for granted);
open the attachment (that's already questionable);
allow macros! (¹);
give the admin's password! (²)
(¹) How on earth can it be that a document (text, spreadsheet, presentation) sent by mail can contain macros so powerful that they can damage the OS severely? How on earth can it be that macros in an email attachment can be enabled at all?
(²) Following best practice, no user should™ have administrative rights, neither by knowing an admin's password nor by by normal working with administrative rights. But the latter happens way too often. Why? Because M$' products are "more comfy" with administrative rights - a design fault. Anyone remember Windows XP? That was effectively unusable with restricted user rights. The situation has since improved a little bit, but not enough by far.
I for one use LMDE since version 2. LMDE 4 was quite good, LMDE 5 really grown-up. Looking forward to LMDE 6!
Will it offer an in-place upgrade such as Mint does?
Only thing I dislike is Cinnamon. I prefer Mate since the beginning, which I just installed additionally. So I use Mate plus Cairo-Dock.
The ones I am talking about would never ever do a search (of course not goggle) and manipulate the system on their own.
After I have installed the system, it just runs. And runs and runs and runs.
Only when an upgrade is necessary (not earlier than four years) I enter the scene.
While in the meantime the process of upgrading is automated and works so seamless that any reasonably intelligent person can do that.
"... typical Linuxes are tools for nerdy hacker types"? I for one strongly disagree.
I have used many flavours of Linux since the mid-90s. For many years now Mint and LMDE are my number one (and debian as host for VirtualBox).
End users get Mint from me. And guess what? Even the most non-nerdy ones are happy with it. Mint is end user friendly to such an extent that it can beat Windows.
My stance is: Anyone who can read and write can use Linux.
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