The Cost Of Arrogance, by Karl Denninger

Posted on May 15, 2017 | 2 Comments

The computer security infrastructure is riddled with holes. What happened with WannaCry this past weekend will happen again and again, and future incidents will be even more serious. From Karl Denninger at theburningplatform.com:

I hate having to use this….

smiley

It wasn’t that long ago that I wrote a few articles on the hubris of our government thinking they were the smartest people in the room when it came to computer hacking.  I pointed out that while we undoubtedly have very smart people working for the NSA and other three-letter agencies so do other nations and their people, along with “unaffiliated” folks who are just plain old-fashioned troublemakers, are equally smart.

Indeed, that was the focus of an article from 10/2014 in relation to one of Comey’s brain-farts in which he implored Congress to basically force back doors into US-made equipment and software.

Now we get treated to the outcome without the force first, because the NSA was writing that code anyway and a group of crooks got their hands on it, perverted it to force cryptolocker software on computers and is spamming it all over the globe.

 How did they get their hands on it?  That’s the subject of much debate. Many are pointing to the “all Russians, all the time” narrative run by many in the so-called “security industry” (including some who have been caught lying in the past) along with half the left-leaning idiocracy parade that makes up most of the mainstream media punditry.
A more-plausible explanation is that it was an inside job, although in reality it doesn’t matter because the entire point is that no matter how good you are someone’s equal or better and thus whether they work for you or someone else it only takes one such person with their own motives and you’re toast.
What we do know is that the “weaponization” of this apparent NSA code took mere hours after the password to the encrypted archive was posted publicly.
There’s another key point here though that nobody in the media is talking about and yet it’s the key point when it comes to this particular aspect of cybersecurity:

I have also said repeatedly that nobody in their right mind runs “packaged” software, say much less “cloud based” software, for critical system purposes from places like Microsoft or any of the other big vendors.  Why?  Because there are too many damned cooks in the kitchen, too many of them are incompetent and will drop a rat in the stew pot whether on accident or otherwise and too many shortcuts will be taken.

To continue reading: The Cost of Arrogance

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2 responses to “The Cost Of Arrogance, by Karl Denninger”

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