South Korea military cyber command was hacked (opens in new tab)

I'm not sure how splitting up the NSA fixes anything. Wouldn't the new offensive organization still be compelled to seek out zero-day exploits as well for their mission? What happens when they find one that the defensive organization hasn't found yet?

When a government researcher (or government-funded researcher) discovers a new Flash vulnerability, the government hasn't created the vulnerability, nor have they prevented anyone else from discovering that same vulnerability.

Lobbying against SIGINT vulnerability collection doesn't actually make us materially safer --- even if things like the "Shadow Brokers" became routine (rather than the unprecedented shitstorm it actually was), the number and caliber of the vulnerabilities we're talking about are a tiny fraction of the threat we face.

Why do you think it matters if NSA stops hoarding 0-days? Let's put that into perspective - iPhone jailbreaking community hacks every new release in days/weeks. And that's just a few people doing it for fun and not getting paid. Companies like Cellebrite have more people paid good money to do the same thing, so they're likely to have an even bigger stash of working exploits. And that's for a locked down device which has all the incentives of being a closed platform.

There's nothing special about NSA or 0-days here. We're using very generic platforms. Lots of organisations have exploits. We're still in a situation where you can point a fuzzer for a few hours at any popular app and get yourself a new 0-day. The only thing that will help you is getting rid of the possibility of exploitation, and limiting the scope when it happens.

So you would like the federal government to effectively subsidize large technology companies by providing free QA for commercial products?

We don't make every building a blast shelter and everyone wear body armor. People who walk through the steps of attacking the US physically are going to succeed.

Our security strategy is to:

A) surveil, infiltrate, and block conspiracies to do so before they happen, and

B) identify, track, and punish our attackers after the fact.

I don't think (and "cyber" policy makers don't seem to think) that making every piece of software free of vulnerabilities is realistic. Sabotaging hacking groups, and building sufficiently scary capabilities for retaliation against nation-states that might attack us, seems much more attainable.

The NSA is already partly split like this. There are parts that work to improve security.

Being secure and having privacy is for the privileged. To actually have the same amount of security and privacy before the internet and device boom is prohibitively expensive for over 90% of the citizens.

They've made absolutely certain of it.

I wonder what kinds of fail-safes these sentries have if they're hacked? It says that there's a human operator. Do they have a kill switch to shut it down if it turns the wrong way so it can't be used against them?

RiscV, TCP+crypto offload, hardware switchports with luajit or nf rules. Reactive UI with hardware rendering and compositing.

Hardware keystore with physical switch to generate and enroll keys, user/owner controlled secrets, one-time programmable as an option, hardwired SAK and OS personality switching key.

Real-time security isolation kernel, hardware-enforced containerization with MMU-protected GPU passthrough.

As much as the US Media wants to you think North Korea is cut off from the rest of the world, it's not. They have a space program and nuclear program, which is more than what a lot of other countries can say.

It's not a bunch of people living under thatch houses.

If the government wants to make strides in something, they will. They can send their students overseas and get their education there. They can collaborate with other countries.

It's not something every citizen can achieve, but you only need a subset to be effective in cyber warfare.

I imagine that they can select the most promising students, enroll them in the military, and give them, under scrutiny, access to all the information they need.

As other commenters have noted, they're not completely primitive. And while yes, their technical know-how is far behind South Korea's, with the state of modern cybersecurity its equivalently harder to keep people out than it is to get in.

For what it's worth, that problem works both ways; I'd imagine South Korea (and the CIA and whoever else is interested) has all sorts of access to North Korean systems.

I seem to recall that the Sony hack was attributed to North Korean hackers and while many people laughed it off, serious investigations pointed that it was really the case. (Just on top of my head, I'll let you dig for sources.)

The same way they got ahold of nuclear weapons knowledge.

If they don't, there are skilled hackers elsewhere who would sell their services.

From the context, my first thought was something like a centralized server providing anti-virus software and/or updates hosts on the internal portion of the network.

Considering the timeline (within the last month or two) and the recently discovered issues in antivirus products from multiple vendors, I think that this scenario (or something similar) is, at the least, plausible.

A compromised UTM firewall would not be unheard of either.

Especially for targets that are very attractive to a determined enemy.

I have a son—he’s 10 years old. He has computers. He is so good with these computers.