Slashdot Mirror
China, Russia Try To Hack Australia's Upcoming Submarine Plans
An anonymous reader writes: Chinese and Russian spies have attempted to hack into the top secret details of Australia's future submarines (paywalled), with both Beijing and Moscow believed to have mounted repeated cyber attacks in recent months. One of the companies working on a bid for Australia's new submarine project said it records between 30 and 40 cyberattacks per night.
Nice ad for a subscription, and another link being a brief blurb. Journalism at its best.
In all seriousness, it is not practical to air-gap computer networks anymore. Operating systems need too much connectivity for updates, and commercial software wants to do authenticity checks to make sure that the corporations using it have actually paid for it. On top of that with the world basically standardized on TCP/IP it's not practical to even use alternate protocols to complicate access.
Actually what updates exactly do you need for a computer that's not on the network at large? Most security updates would be superfluous, and the vast majority of 'fix' updates fix stuff doesn't fix system or program breaking issues for most users, barring those introduced by another update. As for commercial software wanting to phone home, that's easily resolved by NOT choosing such software in the first place.
It's perfectly practical to air-gap networks if you go in with the mind set of it from the get go.