Those hypotheticals about voting machines being insecure? Hand me that tinfoil…
Stderr
All the unbuffered error messages
Those hypotheticals about voting machines being insecure? Hand me that tinfoil…
Offensive strategies are good if (and only if) you have an identifiable, small, number of foes that you can dominate.
A Supervisory Special Agent is a Big Deal in the Secret Service. And SSA Jack Lewis was a Big Deal.
For the last decade, the US military has been hinting that it would like to be able to be more aggressive in cyberspace.
“Does anyone here know anything about ‘firewalls’?” asked Steve Walker, the CEO of Trusted Information Systems (TIS). If you read Mechanizing Proof [stderr] stw crops up a couple of times – he was one of the proponents of trustworthy design through formal verification, and TIS produced an evaluated version of UNIX known as Trusted Xenix.
This is a true story. Some minor details are changed deliberately.
In the late 1990s, the US Government was setting up a case to argue that hacking equated to terrorism. Because, while it was mostly being used for illicit state-craft, it could potentially be used by terrorists. In 1997, at a keynote for Black Hat Briefings, I warned the hacker community what was coming but – at that time – there was a great deal of “community outreach” being done by NSA – they were hiring hackers (whose work we now see leaking on a regular basis) and it was all very hip and friendly.
Meanwhile, there are occasionally signs that the effort is paying off. Security hasn’t been too bad but it’s had its #MeToo moments and the conferences used to have “booth babes” and a lot of “locker room talk.”
Information Security practitioners aren’t used to getting political; so there was apparently a small but vocal stream of nationalists complaining to the conference organizers by the time I was done.
Warning: I get a bit ranty.
A surrealist is walking down the street, and sees a banana peel in his path; he says, “Mon Dieu! I am going to fall down again!” and keeps walking.