Why is it always the Russians or Chinese? Why isn't there a American or Western European scientist/cosmonaut committing similar mistakes/blunders?
I was recently in Aschaffenburg (Germany) doing interoperability tests with some of our networking equipment and a large SCADA vendor. About two hours into the tests, we ran into some problems, which we quickly identified as being related to the firewall on one of the test laptops in their lab having a very restrictive firewall rule (wouldn't allow ping). We had to wait for the better part of two hours while they got approval to adjust the firewall rules to allow ping from another device in the same lab. Note that this was a lab laptop, and these were technically sophisticated people - they understood the implication of allowing ping - it's just that their policy/procedures with regards to security were very, very strict.
I can guarantee you, in any interop tests I've done in Silicon Valley - there would be zero friction (even with the utility companies, enterprise software vendors, scada vendors) around opening up icmp on a lab laptop firewall.
I cite this as an example where Americans (at least those in Norcal) are more lax regarding security than another culture (in this case, whatever was prevalent in the part of Germany Aschaffenburg is located in)
Whether Im in Norcal or not. Most sane organizations are going to turn off ping, its not a cultural thing and it doesnt seem like you faced any friction since you got it opened in 2 hours.
Ive been working here in norcal my whole life and I dont see a culture of lax security in shops that have actual security requirements. Its not the country is the quality of the network administration team.
The reason I bring this up, is that I've been told by a number of my colleagues that german culture, in particular, has a tendency to be more rule structured than in the United States, so, if there was a security policy in place, it had a greater chance of being adhered to in Germany, than in the Norcal.
And the entire point of my little anecdote was to make it clear, that there is broad diversity of attitudes towards rules, policy - and that the "United States" doesn't have a lock on following rules/policy.
Most sane organizations are going to turn off ping
And that ignores related moves (like blocking all of icmp, while we're at it).
So its about income and culture. Company cars are also viewed as a perk and its not unusual to take a company car for a picnic.
Employers are usually fine with this - it improves morale and is less costly than actually paying more.
s|movies, games, music|games/software| and it might be more plausible. (.mkv, .mp3 or even the .rmvb that's weirdly popular in China are hardly common attack vectors.)
However, if we're talking about China, and the demographic of employees that get sent for international matters, then we're definitely not talking about people that can't afford their own computers. I would posit this holds for nearly any country (except North Korea?)
Taking your argument as just "a culture of grabbing untrustworthy software from anywhere is the reason", it becomes more persuasive to me.
You are making use of the logical fallacy "Complex Question Fallacy" - http://www.logicalfallacies.info/presumption/complex-questio... - and I do not approve.