Ask HN: What's to stop Russia pulling the plug?

3 points·cogs··9 comments

If Russia has root access to the most important US Government computers, and has potentially installed many backdoors or trojans. What is to stop those trojans from wiping the disks?

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> What is to stop those trojans from wiping the disks?

Because they want to do something creative and clever with those breached systems, instead of of just recursively deleting everything, which would be the best thing to do IMHO.

Threat of retaliation (in various possible ways, not just hacking them back)

Edit: Would a cyberattack trigger Article 5 of NATO? Not sure.

With sticks and stones? They've been inside the nuclear defence computers for months. With sanctions? When the government may just stop working altogether for a year or more?

Nothing.

One hopes that the government is competent enough to have backups of the important data...

But if you restore from backup aren't you going to restore the trojans? And if the trojans wipe the disks after x days of radio silence?

If you restore the system from clean images (if you have them!), then you can restore the data (and only that!) from backups.

If...

Yes, its the clean images I'm wondering about. It might not be easy to find clean images that are compatible with separate data backups.

The backups can be backups of the whole image. That's fine, as long as the file structure is still there, so that you can restore the data, but not the programs, and even more not the OS.

There's surely a lot of bespoke software in those core Govt systems. So they'll be trying to run a software image from months ago with yesterdays data. The success of that depends on how quickly the software has been changing.

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