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Norway Becomes First NATO Country To Accuse China of Stealing Military Secrets (softpedia.com)
An anonymous reader writes: A high-ranking general in the Norwegian Army and head of the Norwegian Intelligence Service E-tjenesten (Etterretningstjenesten) has made official statements accusing the Chinese government of launching cyber-attacks against his country. Gen. Lunde says that state-sponsored hacking groups have targeted many Norwegian companies during the past year. He says that these companies are suppliers and collaborators of the Norwegian army and that hackers have stolen information considered to be state military secrets. The statements were made to Norwegian TV station TV2 by General Lt. Morten Haga Lunde, who was detailing his agency's most recent intelligence report.
Unfortunately for now China is pretty much the biggest shithead in the world.
So what you're saying is, you haven't been following the Republican debates?
I'm confused. Tell me what is easier, an air gap or buying and maintaining gobs of firewalls to keep the bad guys out?
Security is a process and somewhere along the line someone failed to maintain security or else this would not have happened.
I've worked on air gapped systems before. I'd have two computers on my desk, one on the air gapped network and the other on the internet connected corporate network. That way I could write my code and run my test cases on the secure computer and still have access to e-mail, be able do some internet research, and generally communicate with the outside world. We were not allowed to have our cell phones in the room, the closest they could be was a faraday cage box outside the lab.
There were few telephones in the room to discourage speaking to people outside but still allow people to make quick calls to family or coworkers. (Side note: It was an unlisted number so we'd sometimes get wrong numbers or phone surveys that used a random phone number generator that would normally black list known business numbers. We had to be careful how we answered the phone to not reveal where the phone was located.)
Transfer of information in or out of the lab had to follow a process to keep the lab secure. This is where failures usually happen, the process isn't followed and we'd get a virus or someone did not properly log out a disc. The network was monitored regularly to keep people from removing a computer from the network, a sign someone might take a hard drive or move the computer to the insecure network, or adding anything to the network.
Sharing of data between sites was done by discs sent by a trusted courier. My job did not require me to do this sort of thing so I was not trained on sending discs but I was trained on the process of receiving files from outside the air gap. If a courier was too slow then we'd get a secure network. I'm not sure I can talk on how that network was secured.
Once in a while we'd have the cleaning crew come in to clean the floors and carry out the trash. At that point all work was to stop, computers locked and screens cleared, file cabinets locked, a blinking red light was turned on to indicate the room was no longer secure, and we'd sit around and discuss hunting, sports, or the weather.
As much as the air gap process sucked it was liberating in some ways. One nice thing was that work would stop once I left the room. If we went out to lunch then work never came up while we ate. I didn't have to worry about a cell phone call interrupting me, family and friends learned I was effectively off the grid while working. If someone really needed to get a hold of me that someone would just have to call the front desk and I'd be paged.
An air gap does not require any fancy hardware. Where I worked it was a bit over the top in some respects such as how the front door was secured. Creating an air gap system is pretty cheap, all things considered. The primary thing is to make sure everyone involved is knowledgeable on the processes of maintaining security, those methods were pretty simple as well.
If these private companies and government agencies are not willing to go through the work to create an air gap then they can expect to see a network attack from some far off country. If the firewalls used to secure these systems fail then an attacker's ability to copy or corrupt sensitive data can be bound only by the network bandwidth. An air gap failure tends to be quite limited in scope.
You might find air gaps as a silly idea on computer security but if you have a better idea then I'd like to hear it.
Trump has advocated torturing captive enemies as a deterrent against future attacks, and in a recent speech suggested that the way to end terrorism is to dip bullets in pig blood so muslims will believe getting shot sends them to hell.
The world loves to follow American politics. It's endlessly entertaining, the level of sheer insanity that drives it. But it is no way to run a country.
Naah, it'll take them years to decrypt words like Etterretningstjenesten so the Norwegians are pretty safe.
To put it this way, I would dread the day the US said you wusses take care of yourself we're pulling out of NATO. Despite being occupied once in living memory, we're still so naive we'd be cheering on Chamberlain and "peace for our time" right up to the point Russian Spetsnaz or IS militants start parading in the capital, like they did the very same day the Nazis invaded. Fortunately Eastern Europe has been peeling away from Russia, so hopefully we're not put to the test because I think we'd epic fail again.
That said our military equipment is largely yours, today we fly American F-16s tomorrow we fly American F-35s. We do NATO exercises together, learning tactics from you. Our plans for defense are part of NATOs plan for defense, like forward storage of US military equipment for US troops to defend the alliance. And despite arms trade being a contentious topic we don't advertise much, we actually have some high tech missile systems and such we sell to the US and other allies. Granted the US keeps quite a few cards to themselves, but there's quite a lot worth stealing.
But when it comes to attitude, it's almost like we don't believe in evil anymore. That we're all good at heart and all the bad guys have just had bad childhoods or bad experiences or have been indoctrinated or brain washed. That hate should be met with love, that people are just misunderstood and have lost their way and that everyone can be rehabilitated back to upstanding members of society. And despite all the evidence to the contrary it's not their failure, it's our failure to get them off this destructive path. And if we could just find that, we'd all hold hands and sing kumbayah.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings