One also wonders what's the point of all NSA's "SIGINT" efforts if they can't or won't use it to catch such usually foreign actors, so maybe they also introduced an argument against mass surveillance.
I suggest that the cybersecurity tool-set favors offense these days.
Chris Inglis, recently retired NSA Deputy Director, remarked that
if we were to score cyber the way we score soccer, the tally would
be 462-456 twenty minutes into the game, i.e., all offense. I will
take his comment as confirming at the highest level not only the
dual use nature of cybersecurity but also confirming that offense
is where the innovations that only States can afford is going on.
I also recommend considering Jacob Appelbaum's response to this question[2] from the audience - from someone currently working for the NSA. The summary is that we need people doing NSA-style work, but on the defense side, and we need it now. If the NSA isn't doing that, then maybe people that want to actually protect their country should find somewhere else to work that is actually working on defense.
Seems NSA is obsessed with penetrating everywhere using 'terrorism' as a means to ensure continued funding. Thus the 'defense' nature is quite boring and sadly ignored.
What is a good way to protect against ransomware? Symantec buries the lede with the answers (possibly because of conflicting business interests) which are
1. Limit end user access to mapped drives
2. Deploy and maintain a comprehensive backup solution
http://www.symantec.com/connect/blogs/ransomware-dos-and-don...
But really, how do we justify spending thousands of dollars on hardware? I hate myself for saying this but there are real risks of doing too much as well. We could have our own mini tyrannical regime of secure computing a la the TSA security theater.
Effective user education is challenging. Even developers are prone to use elevated user permissions where none is strictly required just for the sake of convenience. I know I've found myself right-clicking visual studio and clicking "Run as administrator" reflexively after just a few months of working on ASP.NET and IIS.
This is a little off-topic but I imagine the whole funding offense vs defense might be a little more "natural" than we like to admit. Imagine you're a defense manager and there's this other guy who is an offense manager. Just as a football analogy, how do you justify your team's worth when the other team says that there is no good way to quantify the worth of the work you're doing and there is a good way to quantify their team's work? I guess what I'm asking is how do we put a dollar and cent value to defensive cyber security? Can we just ask "How much does the business stand to lose if we lost all our data to ransom ware or worse to a competitor?" or would business think that is overreaching?
Hasn't "a great offense is always the best defense" always been the name of the game? We've gone from fists, to stick and rocks, to spears, to swords, to Greek Fire, to gunpowder, to nuclear weapons. Why not now be the ones to own the power to take down any computer or network?
Great efforts in defense aren't necessarily successful or rewarded either, e.g. Reagan's "Star Wars"/SDI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative which was widely criticized and failed miserably.
While cyberdefense is not in the same unrealistic realm as SDI was in the 80s, the ways that most people think about security- firewall on the perimeter and/or securing each node, pen testing, patches, and locking down what can be installed/used- don't really solve the problem of having a wide attack vector. Imagine if you could shoot a single soldier out in the field and it would kill his/her whole battalion, the base in which he/she was stationed, and perhaps destroy or weaken the entire army or even armed forces to which he/she belonged? That is the situation now.
Playing ultimate defense requires much more isolation. We shouldn't be on the same network, we shouldn't always be connected, and we should really limit how the outside world can affect each node. That isn't often the case with the networks we have currently.
Hasn't "a great offense is always the best defense"
always been the name of the game?
There's no cyberattack equivalent of that - it's not like bricking a few $1000 PCs would disable foreign cyberattack capabilities.
To speak about SE for Android: I'm not sure how much weight I would lend to a few NSA employees helping Google/AOSP create SELinux profiles for Android. (It is recent work, though!)
I'm fairly certain that I would lend a lot of weight to public efforts to harden systems against the kinds of attacks that their TAO division launches.
Expect the same behavior from the NSA. They will use their power first and foremost whenever it benefits themselves, not to protect all citizens or corporations.
The Brits acted sparingly using the cracked Enigma code precisely because they were trying to protect as many citizens as they could -- if they acted every time, the Germans would have figured out the code was compromised and switched to a stronger code.
It would be like if the British "blew their cover" and the Germans could only respond by completely ceasing all encrypted communication. Not the best possible outcome if they do, but still a positive outcome.
It's an even better outcome for cybercrime, since ceasing all communications would mean ceasing everything. If the NSA did this, the criminal would probably just stop operating, which means they might not be brought to justice, but at least the attacks would stop.
Can you imagine the FBI saying, just pay the mafia?
I hesitate to say something so pedantic, but with the number of people who attribute crazy properties to the concept of "free markets", etc. I think we should just be clear on this one.
There is also a defensive side to NSA's mission that is defense-oriented (IAD), but the most recognizable contributions that most of the HN crowd may be familiar with are SELinux and perhaps a modest body of research involving how to secure your systems (the defense side is much more open than the offensive side). The problems I see there is that these measures are all very much aimed at large corporations, not start-ups (seriously, I can count the number of start-ups outside the intelligence / DoD space I've ever heard of that use SELinux or follow NSA hardening guidelines on two fingers) and there is clearly a huge gap between how much big businesses take security seriously compared to start-ups from both a cultural and business driven set of motivations.
The number of start-ups derailed / completely wiped out by extortion attempts is rather small compared to the number that actually exist but the legions of security consulting companies around the DC beltway wants everyone to think that it's really terrible and that everyone's a target. The truth is that everyone needs to be secure "enough" to not be as vulnerable as the really stupid guys and that while it might sting a lot to be down for a few hours or so and lose revenue / trust from users, diverting your company's resources towards hardening so much is quite costly for smaller companies and it's just more practical to have really fast re-provisioning set as a priority for your devops / ops engineers (most start-ups can do this far better than larger companies).
To be blunt, if you think like this and make legal arguments like this, you don't understand western civilization and should go and think for a while about all of society.
Unless of course you're kidding and being cynical.
It's 2015: computing is part of society, and computing free from attacks is little different from walking about in public unharmed. It takes massive contortions of perception to feel otherwise. Everyone is online! (Just as everyone goes out now and then.)
Ransomware is almost literally still just ransom.