Comment by nerdjon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nerdjon | Hacker News Reader

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> - You need more than one ISP.

I addressed this in my previous response. It is still an external trust, even if you have redundancy.

> - You need diverse Operating Systems and Databases.

I have never ever seen a company run the same server side software deployed to multiple different operating systems.

> - You deploy in phases with canary releases.

As I mentioned in a previous post, there are going to be critical enough systems that may be under a serious threat of breach that any wait is not worth the risk.

Also as I have already mentioned, in many cases automatic updates is turned on for compliance reasons that may not allow what we think is common sense for the vast majority of software.

> - You don't deploy on Fridays....

I agree but to the best of my knowledge this was essentially a security definition updates not a code update. That is the kind of thing that you would push out when you have it otherwise your systems could be vulnerable over the weekend.

> there are going to be critical enough systems that may be under a serious threat of breach that any wait is not worth the risk.

Disagree strongly. You are analyzing risk the wrong way. That is what I call: "Security by being on the latest patch"

Zero days occur every day and many are ongoing right now. Your antivirus vendor or OS vendor, needs hours to days, to weeks, to detected them, understand the attack, come up with a defense, test (hopefully...) the defense patch, deploy in phases (hopefully). So you are always many hours to days behind the latest threats and before getting such a protection.

The core idea here is "Critical System"

If the system is critical, it's security and robustness needs to rely on it's security architecture. Not "being on the latest patch". You will always be catching up to any threats.

How is "being on the latest patch" (security definitions), not part of the security architecture? No where am I implying that it is the only part of security.

Also you are still ignoring, that for many of these companies they have not have a choice due to compliance requirements.

That being said, so great maybe we can avoid this issue. But instead maybe next time instead it will be. "Well, you run security software X and when you were breached they had a protection out for this, why were you not up to date?"

The fact remains that what happened yesterday was an extraordinary situation that I highly doubt anyone seriously thought it was a serious risk. Since most people would safely assume that a vendor pushing security updates would do basic testing.

Also you are focusing on security when there are other dependencies that could bring down your system. That is my point here. We are focusing so much on how this one thing should have been done differently and that the companies are somehow to blame when this could have been any number of other things that would not have been as global of an impact but could still bring down major systems.

You are completely ignoring the fact that some countries, some airlines and some 911 centers, many hospitals were not taken down. The reason? The diversity and phased deployments I am arguing for.

> Also you are still ignoring, that for many of these companies they have not have a choice due to compliance requirements.

They have a choice. They could run their system properly. You are arguing for reasons of compliance...When this incident is the clear demonstration being compliant has nothing to do with being secure and robust.

Welcome to new generation "cybersecurity" experts that just regurgitate buzzwords like "compliance" and "guardrails" in addition to filling out risk matrix spreadsheets.

Its all PaaS/SaaS now, old-school properly engineered isolated solutions require too much expensive staffing.

I'm waiting for a vendor like zscaler to be hacked - what could go wrong with having thousands of companies do MITM SSL interception via a single vendor.

That's a nice juicy target for hackers if I ever saw one...

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