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Comment by justapassenger | Hacker News Reader

Seems like they should invest more into cybersecurity, if someone was able to “steal” their Bitcoin and take over their infrastructure ;).

But honestly, this only shows that IT systems are nowadays so complex that you cannot get them right and be able to truly protect you, no matter if you’re good or bad guy.

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I doubt anyone stole their bitcoins though. I assume they just transferred it out themselves and will cash out later.

I was thinking the same. But it would be hard to cover such a conspiracy.

It just takes one agent or informant on the inside to bring the whole house down.

If you have single point of failure, either on technical or human level, you aren’t doing it correctly.

But it’s really hard to build systems and organizations like that.

> takes one agent or informant

Only if that agent has the master keys. Strong security is about making sure that there is no master key.

I was thinking more about the soft targets and people based parts of the system, but you raise an interesting point. Zero trust systems might be solvable from a tech perspective, but zero trust organizations from a social perspective are a whole lot harder to design and enforce, maybe impossible.

In accounting systems, which are targets of fraud and malfeasance (e.g. Enron), there is a "4 eyes" principle. It takes at least 2 people to change something that impacts the financials. But that can't stop 2 people from colluding.

Back to the topic, if one agent or informant builds trust with one actor in the target group, and they collude or if one slip is made, it could be game over. Once the org is compromised, how do you know who to trust?

I was thinking something along these lines. Any admin access to any critical/secure system can only be made thought a channel that will record the session. Perhaps such things exist.

https://xkcd.com/538/

> like they should invest more into cybersecurity

I would say invest more thought, less money.

For example, use open source more. Minimize the amount of data and information you have that needs to be closed source.

Avoid Windows. Use Gmail over Outlook. Have offline backups with sneakernet disaster planning. Get a cheap safety deposit box for storing keys. Use 2FA. There are lots of free/low cost ways to have better security.

> Use Gmail over Outlook.

Why would you recommend this? I can understand the reasoning behind the rest of your recommendations, but not this one.

AFAIK, Gmail has suffered on the order of 100x+ fewer security incidents than Outlook. However, I am unclear on the distinction between cloud Outlook and the Exchange/Outlook combo. So me saying "Outlook" may be a mistake, and the correct term may be Exchange.

It’s not 2001 anymore. You can have both secure windows and Linux infrastructure.

Telling people to just use Linux as a remedy doesn’t help. If you don’t invest into securing your Windows infra, your Linux infra will be also full of holes.

In 2016, while I was still working at Microsoft, they gave us cloud engineers a separate laptop for accessing customer data (they called them SAWS, for Secure Access Workstation), because they decided that our normal everyday Windows 10 machines with root privileges could not be trusted. This was in 2016, not 2001.

I do not think you can have secure Windows infrastructure today. In the future, a few years after it's fully open source, perhaps.

Of course you are free to make your own bets.

This sounds more like a policy decision. Any serious company is heavily limiting how customer data is accessed. Lots of them have special rooms, with heavy physical security, where you cannot even bring electronic watch, not even talking about your work phone or normal work laptop. And those companies often run on Linux.

Open source doesn’t make stuff magically secure. Remember heartbleed? Or how easy it’s was proven (by sketchy research, sure, but that’s secondary point) to bring malicious code into THE open source project, Linux kernel?

Believing that by simply using open source you have secure infra, and that by using Windows is naive view by people who never seriously worked on security for big companies.

I say all of that as a heavy Linux supporter. Linux is better, yes. But it’s not a magic bullet. I’ve worked in Windows shops that had extremely good security, and Linux shops that could’ve been hacked by someone after one day classes of how to be a hacker.

Agreed that open source isn't perfect, but 99.999% secure is still a lot better than 99.9% secure.

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