College to close after severe ransomware attack

[semiotix]

@nick_warr

I’m trying hard to not to talk about things I really know far too little about

You’ll never make it in academia with that attitude!

_{j/k, I am a super-duper expert in all I deign to speak of}

[Professor59]

Just in case we were wondering how WW3 will be fought, this is it.

Sure, this particular case sounds like white nationalists, but whenever Russia and/or China is ready, every hospital, power plant, internet and cell provider - you get the idea - is going down. Government funded employers are especially vulnerable (outside of the White House), as are medium and small business, as they do not have funding for this purpose.

Big banks can usually defend themselves, though data breaches have cast doubt there. Big tech, big retail, big pharma, etc., can afford to have defenses.

I’m not conspiracy theory guy. I’ve just seen it happen too many times. I would say, OK, but we’re working on cyber warfare ourselves, but that will be small consolation. Can we all get tickets to Cancun?

[jerwin]

@semiotix

Antioch College is one example that comes to mind (although they’ve risen from the grave, sort of).

hurrah, my alma mater is famous for its infamy.

[sdmikev]

I don’t disagree with you for the most part, although I don’t think OTS software and operating systems are going anywhere soon. Enterprises (no matter the size) are not going to abandon Windows and Active directory. Though there is literally zero reason to have on-prem Exchange and Sharepoint anymore.
This is why what I mentioned about encrypted backups including off-site. We were able to get someone back from a ransomware attack over the course of a weekend because of that one time and that included rebuilding their HyperV host (fuck me, I hate HyperV) and restoring all of their VMs.
That being said, SO many attacks come from simple phishing emails.
And so many companies have open vectors because they don’t actively keep their shit up to date - both from a patching perspective or even using out of date OS. The latter… don’t get me started. But patching is simple to literally automate across an environment, but I’m shocked to still see people patching MANUALLY, which leads to being behind. Always.

[PsiPhiGrrrl]

After 157 years, HBCU Lincoln College closing following enrollment drop and...

@Mindysan33

The damage being done to higher ed (private and public institutions) is pretty significant, as we all know.

Too true:

Number of colleges shrinks again, including publics and private nonprofits

The impact to the employees and communities are bad. There’s also the lost opportunities for students to be considered, too:

More than 1 million fewer students are in college. Here's how that impacts...

@anon33932455

The head of IT here on my campus tells me that we get thousands of attacks (apart from phishing attempts) every day

I’ve been hearing most complaints about this from the private sector. The numbers are alarming there, too, but do tend to get more attention. IT managers are getting hit on multiple fronts though, because some of these attacks are enabled by the very people they’ve been hired to protect. So, they’re frustrated and tired, too. Environments where people are allowed to BYOD are a nightmare.

@lizard-of-oz

When you’re rely on proprietary software (Windows, Office, AD, learning management systems, “security software” etc.), you’re still mostly fucked, because that software is simply bad quality, and the vendor is not liable even if their software was explicitly to blame.

This is partly what makes me break into a cold sweat when I see the logo on computers in restaurants, big box chains, and in doctor’s offices.

[robertmckenna]

@lizard-of-oz

I doubt that. In the digital domains, evidence as to the origins of an attack is sketchy at best, who can enter your system can also delete or fake their traces. If you can’t watch people in the act, what hard evidence do you have?

It usually comes out when they come looking for money. They’re nowhere near as anonymous as they, and other people think, but it doesn’t really matter because they face no consequences in their home state.

@Professor59

but whenever Russia and/or China is ready, every hospital, power plant, internet and cell provider - you get the idea - is going down.

Don’t forget Israel. It’s a huge player in the gangster/rogue state nexus.

[lizard-of-oz]

@sdmikev

Enterprises (no matter the size) are not going to abandon Windows and Active directory. Though there is literally zero reason to have on-prem Exchange and Sharepoint anymore.

I’m not too happy with the idea that moving your stuff to the cloud necessarily makes things more secure.

@sdmikev

And so many companies have open vectors because they don’t actively keep their shit up to date - both from a patching perspective or even using out of date OS. The latter… don’t get me started. But patching is simple to literally automate across an environment, but I’m shocked to still see people patching MANUALLY, which leads to being behind. Always.

Let’s assume for a moment that patches are available in a timely manner (which is not true, for example quite recently it took Oracle more than 5 fucken months to release a patch for a critical vulnerability. Let’s also assume the proprietary software you’re using is not a pile of shit to begin with.

If you just patch some vulnerable software, but fail to rebuild and redeploy all your machines that software has been running on, you can’t ever be sure that any of your machines has not been compromised in the time it took people to develop that patch. Only if you redeploy you can be sure.

And one of the most important reasons why people don’t patch right away is because patches break stuff all the time, and then it’s really costly to go back to the previous version, so you need to test if everything still works after a patch, and you have less of that testing if wait for the patch of the patch to arrive first.

So it’s not simply enough to automate patching, you also need to be able to roll back, and you need to automate redeploying the whole machine, and not merely automate patching it. While you’re at it, you could automate some tests that check if shit is still working. If that sounds a lot like what is done in actual software development these days, that is because we’re dealing with the same class of problems here.

I’d rather reduce the attack surface, and just use the stuff I absolutely need, and then focus on getting that as secure as possible. But that regrettably is a trend in either software development or in operations. People add complexity, and then are naturally overwhelmed when having to deal with that on a daily basis.

Obligatory:

Modern software development