There are a few things I find fascinating about the current war. First and foremost, it’s a war of attrition and apparently that never occurred to the pentagon command structure. One of the things that Europe learned pretty thoroughly before the Franco-Prussian War, is that an experienced command structure that knows how to communicate and plan is essential. Or so we would think.
I am going to continue the thread over at [stderr] but I wanted to branch into a side-topic here.
It’s funny how much effort we put into building redundant and reliable systems (e.g.: “cloud computing”) that scale and replicate well – yet they are subject to the simplest of attacks that can disable them.
I’m going to declare this up front: I have no private knowledge about this topic; my beliefs are formed by a lot of study of the topic since 1978, a lot of strategy gaming, and a lot of news reading. Naturally, any commentary about nuclear strategy is going to be either a) ignorant except for open source material or b) muzzled by secrecy. I.e.: Those that talk about this stuff are ignorant, those that aren’t ignorant are silent.
On my recent posting about adhesives, deep state covert operative flex commented, kindly. [stderr] And it reminded me of an actual thing that happened.
Back in the mid 90s I had an unusual experience, in which I was caught in the blast-corona of Operation Sundevil – the Secret Service’s attempt to gain relevance in cybersecurity [wik]. My role was small but it made me realize that the government, at that time, was ignorant enough that they could easily be stampeded into doing stupid things, a form of “terrorism by stupid cop” which I later re-framed as “a denial of clue attack.”
I used to work for a consultancy called Trusted Information Systems, back in 1990-1994, which was a big contractor for DARPA and NSA. That was how I wound up building security systems in some pretty interesting places including the Clinton White House.
Getting infected with ransomware is management’s decision. They just don’t realize that they made that decision; it’s one of those things like driving under the influence of LSD: you may have plenty of time to regret it if it turned out to be a bad idea.
When I encounter a weird story that might be an interesting core for some bloggy ruminations, I usually email it to myself. Email is my “post it note” and it’s been a great technique since I keep a complete archive of my emails going back to the 80s. The problem is that I have an in-box that consists mostly of weird messages from myself (2000+ at present).
This is one that, I admit, never occurred to me, either. The fact that it did not is profoundly embarrassing. Ready for a little F-35 bashing?