May 25, 2017

Cyber Security

It is sorrowful to have to write this, indeed for some out there in the audience (who've suffered great losses in the wake of the most recent worldwide cyberattack) it may make them WannaCry.  

An article dated May 20, 2017 in news.xinhuanet.com titled Spotlight: WannaCry outbreak a cybersecurity wake-up call, calls this global event "a tribute to negligence," quoting James A. Lewis, a cybersecurity expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.  James A. Lewis goes on to say, "This [the WannaCry attack] highlights one of the biggest problems in cybersecurity: many people still don't take it seriously."

Not so long ago, in the United States of America, the leader of a certain unnamed organisation came up with an "impudent plan to launder public records" that, although begun by purely amateur agents, "was progressing rapidly and with a degree of success that few would have believed possible" in 1975. This organisation had infiltrated agents into the Internal Revenue Service, the US Coast Guard and the Drug Enforcement Agency over a very short time.  How did they do it?  The fact is, they did not have to work very hard.  "The amateur agents had discovered it was ridiculously easy to infiltrate, bug and burgle US government offices," quoting from a book by Russell Miller titled Bare Faced Messiah, found online at cs.cmu.edu.

A man named Georg Hegel once said, "We learn from history that we do not learn from history," as cited from goodreads.com.  Now there's more fresh evidence to prove Hegel correct.  Referring to James A. Lewis in the same article quoted earlier, "According to the expert [James A. Lewis], the 2016 Verizon Data Breach Report, one of the best sources of information on breaches, found once again that the vast majority of successful hacks required only the most basic techniques because defense is too often ignored, something that has been true for years."

Boy, oh boy.