More About the SolarWinds Breach

This may be a bit scatter-shot; there’s a lot to cover, and I’m going to try to fold in some answers to comments on my previous posting on the topic. [stderr] I also want to predict the future, so I can say “I told you so!” when it happens.

To be frank, cybersecurity pisses me off so much whenever I think about it, that it’s almost painful to write about. But the questions are interesting and worthy of respect.

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SolarWinds Breach

Some mornings, when your alarm clock fires off, you just roll over and slap the “snooze” button. If you do that long enough, you can get quite good at it; there have been mornings when I hit the “snooze” button 15 or more times in a row, pushing back my wake-up time by as much as 2 hours. I used to know someone who claimed that they could sleep-walk through their morning status meeting, effectively grabbing several extra hours of sleep.

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Moving The Fire

I never noted down the date when I first lit my forge over at the school building. I think it was about 2 and a half years ago (at the tail end of 6 months of hard work setting up the rest of the shop). But the time has come to move the forge. Which means moving the propane.

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How Apropos

In my recent posting on Cyberpunk, Commentariat(tm) Agent LykeX decided to call my bluff [stderr] regarding the question of gamifying hacking/cyberwar in a semi-realistic manner. So, in order to better explain the topic, I have arranged for the federal government to horribly face-plant its entire security strategy by suffering a devastating transitive trust attack. Seriously, the timing is remarkable.

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Conversations With Dad

I called dad while I was driving home; it’s good to check up and make sure everyone’s doing OK. At my age, one cannot take one’s parents’ presence for granted, anymore. I wanted to gloat a little bit about the amazing way that science has come through for us, in spite of the bureaucratic roadblocks thrown in its path – the Covid-19 is toast, like a certain other malignant pathogen I won’t name – it’s now just a matter of time and not stumbling as we approach the finish-line.

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Grain

Etching blades is a quietly satisfying process. You put the thing in some liquid and some bubbles appear; then you wait. Sometimes you take it out and scrub or rinse it and put it back. What you don’t want to do is take a nap (which turns into a full night’s sleep) while you’ve got a blade in the tank.

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