It sounds as though the National Republican Senatorial Committee has a problem with its email servers, too. Let me shorten this somewhat: if you’re putting Microsoft Exchange on an internet-facing server, and you’re not managing it fairly carefully, you’re snack food for hackers.
Let me introduce you to the “intelligence Catch-22.” In case you’re not familiar with Heller’s Catch-22, from the brilliant book by that name, it goes like this:
You cannot possibly get a medical discharge from the military based on insanity, because only insane people want to be in the military; therefore if you want to be discharged from the military you are sane and therefore your discharge is denied.
We keep hearing about it: Russians are manipulating the election! They’re leaking this and that, and hacking this and that, and it’s going to change everything.
I wish.
Margaret Hamilton’s impact on computing would be hard to overstate. For one thing, I nearly wrote “impact on software engineering” but apparently that’s a term she had a lot to do with promoting, during her tenure at NASA.
After the Yahoo! disclosure, there was some general falling all over oneself from some of the other large providers, “we didn’t!” “no, not us!” etc.
Methinks they doth protest too much.
Cyberwar is the Department of Stone Throwing, promoting the increased use of stone projectiles, from the safety of its offices – which are in the Department of Glass Houses.
Other than “don’t use the internet”* the best thing you can do is: your backups. I’ve covered that elsewhere. The second best thing you can do is to get out of the password business. The third best thing you can do is segregate some of your computing.
Today we learn that Yahoo!’s user database appears to have been compromised: 500 million accounts plus associated information including (apparently) hashed passwords.
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There’s an important piece being published at The Guardian, regarding the CIA’s attempt to conceal its torture program, and how congressional investigation was stymied (and allowed itself to be).