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Comment by Renaud | Hacker News Reader

When you see the size if the impact across the world, the number of people who will die because hospital, emergency and logistics systems are down…

You don’t need conventional war any more. State actors can just focus on targeting widely deployed “security systems” that will bring down whole economies and bring as much death and financial damage as a missile, while denying any involvement…

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I always think it's easy for state actors to pull out this trick.

Considering PR review is usually done within the team. A state actor can simply insert a manager, a couple of senior developers and maybe a couple of junior developers into a large team to do the job. Push something in Friday so few people bother to check, gets approved by another implant and here you go.

All people can then leave leisurely.

This happened with intelij a while back didn't it? A spy pushed a code that caused a suplly chain outage somewhere, I can't remember the details.

Anyway, I believe this is what happened here in this case.

Seeing all the cancelled and delayed flights, it makes me think a hacking kind of climate activism/radicalism would be more useful than gluing hands to roads, or throwing paint on art.

Activism is mostly about awareness, because generally you believe your position to be the one a logical person will accept if they learn about it, so doing things that get in the news but only gets you a small fine or month in jail are preferred.

Taking destructive action is usually called "ecoterrorism" and isn't really done much anymore.

This is, in a way, why Kaspersky was banned in the US... "who scans the scanners?". Kaspersky is not that different from a Cloudstrike EDR product.

   https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4092187

But will Europe ban CrowdStrike?

Given how obvious the vector is for targeting after its so widespread, stands reason to believe the same state actors would push phishing schemes and other such efforts in order to justify having a tool like crowdsrike used everywhere. We are focusing on the bear trap snapping shut here, but someone took the time to set up that trap right where we'd be stepping in the first place.

I was in my 20s during the peak hysteria of post-9/11 and GWOT. I had to cope with the hysteria hyped 24/7 by media and DHS of a constant terror threat to determine if it was real.

The fact that global infra is so flimsy and vulnerable brought me tremendous relief. If the terror threats were real, we would have been experiencing infrastructure attacks daily.

I remember driving through rural California thinking if the terrorist cells were everywhere, they could trivially <attack critical infra that I don't want to be flagged by the FBI for>

I've read a lot of cyber security books like Countdown to Zero Day, Sandworm, Ghost in the Wires and each one brings me relief. Many of our industrial systems have the most flimsy, pathetic , unencrypted & uncredentialed wireless control protocols that are vulnerable to remote attack.

The fact that we rarely see incidents like this, and when they do happen, they are due to gross negligence rather than malice, is a tremendous relief.

This is the silver lining of global capitalism. When every power on earth is invested in the same assets there is little interest in rocking the boat unless the financial justification to do so is sufficiently massive.

Until deglobalization sufficiently spreads to the software ecosystem. I have just a few hours ago attended a lecture by a very high profile German cybersecurity researcher (though he keeps a low profile). The guy is a real greybeard, can fluently read any machine code, he was building and selling Commodore64 cards at 14yo. (I don't even know what that is.) He's hell bent on not letting in any US code nor a single US chip. Intel is building a 2nm fab in Magdeburg, Germany, the most advanced in the world when it will be completed. German companies are developing their own fabs not based on or purchased from ASML. German developing their own chip designs. A new German operating system in Berlin.

Huawei, after their CEO got imprisoned in Canada took Linux source code and rewrote it file by file in C++. Now they're using it in all their products, called HarmonyOS. The Chinese are recruiting ex-TSMC engineers in mainland China and giving them everything, free house, car, money, free pass between Taiwan and China just to build their own fab in a city I don't know how to spell the name.

I'm not German but I'll go to the hell with the move to deglobalize, or in other words, de-Americanize. This textarea cannot possibly express my anger and hatred against the past fifty years of the domination of Imperium Americana. Not a single moment they let us live without bloodshed and brutal oppression.

What do you think preceded the imperium americana? You'd have to go back thousands of years to find an example of a world not dominated by empires.

I am not against the idea of civilization, authority, hierarchy and empires. I am against those who are unjust and evil oppressors on the face of Earth.

it turns out, civilization works because most of us are civilized.

Ours does

This clusterfuck is a dress rehearsal if you ask my honest opinion.

I'm not so sure it's hyperbole: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41002977

We are far past that point. So many critical systems are running on autopilot, with people who built and understood them retiring, and a new batch of unaware, aloof, apathetic people at the helm.

There's no real need for some Bad Actor -- at some point, entropy will take care of it. Some trivial thing somewhere will fail, and create a cascade of failures that will be cataclysmic in its consequences.

It's not fear-mongering, it's kind of a logical conclusion to decades of outsourcing, chasing profit above and over anything else, and sheer ignorance borne of privilege. We forgot what it took to build the foundations that keep us alive.

That's just what old people like to think: that they are super important and could never be replaced. A few months ago I replaced a "critical" employee that was retiring and everyone was worried what would happen when he was gone. I learned his job in a month.

Most people aren't very important or special and most jobs aren't that difficult.

What is the parable about the engineers who made a beautiful public bath that stopped working, and nobody understood how to fix it?

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