Slashdot Mirror
Tech Firms Let Russia Probe Software Widely Used by US Government (reuters.com)
Major global technology providers SAP, Symantec, and McAfee have allowed Russian authorities to hunt for vulnerabilities in software deeply embedded across the U.S. government, Reuters reported on Thursday. From the report: The practice potentially jeopardizes the security of computer networks in at least a dozen federal agencies, U.S. lawmakers and security experts said. It involves more companies and a broader swath of the government than previously reported. In order to sell in the Russian market, the tech companies let a Russian defense agency scour the inner workings, or source code, of some of their products. Russian authorities say the reviews are necessary to detect flaws that could be exploited by hackers. But those same products protect some of the most sensitive areas of the U.S government, including the Pentagon, NASA, the State Department, the FBI and the intelligence community, against hacking by sophisticated cyber adversaries like Russia.
Tech firms let Russia probe software widely used by US government, following same processes US government, and all other governments, use.
This is a non-story. They try to make it sound like this is some nefarious method to undermine the US government, when the reality is that they're checking to make sure there aren't NSA backdoors.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Of course a defense department looking to use a piece of software is going to inspect it for security. Frankly it's more a sign of Russia's lack of security that they would use US software on their systems than anything else. Security through obscurity isn't security so opening the source is irrelevant to anything from a security perspective.
Lefties don't understand and appreciate just how much their relentless hyperbole hurts their own causes, especially when what they're claiming is obviously nonsensical. Lefties have pushed this 'Russia' narrative so much that normal people just roll their eyes and ignore it. It's the same with things like 'racism', 'Nazis', 'climate change', and 'rape', and 'gender'. The Lefties pushed these agendas/false-accusations so much that normal people no longer care. The real danger of this is that it forces Lefties to resort to pushing far more extreme agendas/false-accusations in order to try to get a rise out of normal people. Their hypocrisy of these Lefties will likely result in them doing some extraordinarily harmful things.
How about you get over Benghazi and her emails? You know the difference between those stories and Russia? The investigations were completed and found nothing.
If Russia is nothing, then let the investigations complete it and tell us so. Then you can bitch that we're not "over it".
Only crack the nuts that crack. You don't put the ones that don't crack in the sack.
Every large-enough customer can get access to source-code of closed software. This is completely standard and there is nothing nefarious going on here. This only endangers anything US if the US messed up their own review.
Who writes these demented articles?
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I'm really surprised so few people on Slashdot understand the difference between open source software (and "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow") and closed source software being reviewed by a select few actors who have a motive to hide their findings.
Putin preferred Trump over Clinton. Putin put his machine to work to help get Trump elected. So far, that's fairly agreed upon. The question is if Trump knew or not.