Comments by "Stephen Villano" (@spvillano) on "ABC News"
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They really don't have to tell you even now. The network provider, aka your cell phone company should have told you, it's their responsibility to do so.
The NSA reported it to the FBI, the FBI investigated the US side, informed the cell phone companies and awaited any voluntary reporting, as there is no mandated reporting in the US. Anything beyond that is gratis and you're complaining.
Their primary focus is to hope that the company accepts help and help them end the breach, once it's fully understood and properly blocked.
And finding all of that out, even from the company side is a royal pain in the balls. I've handled a few, a few minutes worth of an attack can take hours to analyze and reconstruct from individual network packets in the tens of thousands at a minimum. The server administrator responsible for the specific compromised server(s) then has to be contacted and their management, reporting on precisely what was done to their server shared, incident responders then track the responses at each level and report back to senior management.
Reporting to end users in up to the senior corporate management, by law.
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@theeater1756 I see, your ignorance of history is indeed boundless! First, let's review civil unrest and lawlessness, where the militia was called in to restore order.
Nauvoo, Illinois, Mormon war against civilian authority, the press and whatever suited their interests at the time in 1843, militia called up, restored order. Guess Illinois is still in the throes of civil violence by Mormons today, by your lousy candle.
1857, Mormon war in Utah, militia quelled a theocratic attempt at takeover of the territory. Guess Utah is a barren desert, devoid of human life in your Bizarro world.
1844 Philadelphia Nativist Riots, Protestants vs Roman Catholics, Protestants using stolen artillery against Catholic churches, guess they're still blowing up the city, depopulating it daily or something, huh?
1857, Bowery Dead Rabbits Riots, gang warfare in the streets, militia restored order or maybe NYC is dead, barren of life, due to the incessant warfare between the Dead Rabbits and the Bowery Boys. Pity, would've been a nice city had it not been destroyed by continuous violence once the militia left - oh wait, it's still there.
Let's move into modern times.
Let's see now, Seattle George Floyd Protests, federal forces called in, because an idiot POTUS proclaimed literally that the city was burning to the ground daily, really impressive builders up there! Order remains or maybe the city is still burning to the ground nightly, rebuilt during the day to bonfire nightly - oh, no it isn't.
Or maybe the North American continent is a barren wasteland, order never being restored and we're all dead.
Folks, do admire our lead paint abatement programs, children no longer grow up with severe brain damage like our friend here.
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@Uzziah33 didn't realize he was born in the US, largely because I really don't track what celebrity was born where.
Was aware of the lack of that eatery in China, lucky them! I've had actual Chinese food, quite tasty and varied tremendously by region.
As for eating cat, I leave sexual practices to those practicing such privacy preferences, same with the long dog...
I'll just get my coat...
As for the PRC knowing if someone's late, frankly, I think they care about that as much as I don't care about it. Well, maybe if you had a government position, they might care. Or had a financial officer position. Or network administrator position. John Q. Public, nobody cares save the boss and nobody cares what the boss thinks anyway.
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@roeko10 welcome to the wide world of irregulars. Not every "military" force can afford uniforms after buying weapons.
And their training and professionalism also betrays that weakness.
Hamas, by definition is civilian. Similar was Taliban and AQ in Afghanistan, hence why we classified them as unlawful combatants, but still afforded them Geneva Convention protections as a matter of course.
But then, we dealt with non-Convention forces in the past with Japan, who wasn't signatory and ratifier of the Geneva and Hague Conventions, but had agreed to abide by them (and largely didn't). Easier to stay playing the good guy than pretend to be the good guy and rely upon everyone recognizing the white hat.
With a few gaffes along the way. WWII Marines wearing Japanese ears on a string as a necklace a few times, a few in Vietnam, one arrested for making such in Afghanistan. But, we also had press along to keep us honest.
IDF, not so much. Minimal to no press, total obscurity, obstruction and zero visibility, save what they want released and this, being an exception they couldn't hide on a bet.
Yeah, not a fan of how they're fighting this war. And I'm the farthest thing in the universe from gentle in war. But, it's good to have oversight and to have civilian control of our military, rather than "sic 'em" and walk away.
And flooding tunnels hostages are known to be inside of, yeah, no. As much as I'd dread it, I'd personally be going into those tunnels to ferret out the hostages.
Once they're out, fuel-air the damned complex comprehensively, after obscuring exists with WP smoke.
While trumpeting a slogan far and wide, "khalas, Hamas!". Arabic for, "Enough, Hamas" and well, not in the passive.
Yallah, Wallah, I do know a bit of Arabic.
English equivalent transliteration, "listen, swear to God..."
Although, I'm a bit more fluent in Arabic profanity. ;)
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When did the FBI become responsible for the network security of telephone companies? Do you think they're also responsible for the security of your door locks too?
Now, how the real world works. They may notice traffic at landing points for overseas to US fiber, trace it as it's going and get a warrant for a tap, which just mirrors that traffic to and from the US destination of interest. You know, that cell phone company. They'll more likely want to mirror all traffic from the foreign IP or even VPN.
They typically being the NSA, whose actual job such things are and actually do work closely with the FBI when traffic goes domestic, since the NSA is part of the DoD and hence is prohibited from police functions within the US by the Posse Comitatus Act.
The analysis will eventually show information about the internals of the telecom's network, specifically what's being compromised and how by that foreign traffic.
The business is then notified by the FBI and their security people (the business, not the government, since it's not the government's network) investigate and respond.
How do I know that? I am an information security professional and have been on the receiving end of those visits, with a full briefing and report, then had to dig away, trace and analyze the attacks and spread, literally recording network packets and analyzing them in real time, extracting their malware used and submitting copies to corporate for inclusion into antivirus, the FBI as evidence and report to the management and executives in both the company and FBI. In one attack that lasted a full seven years for a low number Fortune company, I traced traffic coming from a network blind spot to financial servers, where I captured an entire RDP (remote desktop protocol) session to a server, captured their latest and greatest version of software for submission, alerted the administrators of the server and their management. We installed sensors to monitor that blind spot and captured the entry point - a literally forgotten test server that'd been left on and connected to the DMZ for nearly a decade. Once that went offline, they lost their beach head and the attack was finally ended.
Royal PIA from start to finish, as it's not a magical window where I visibly see the session, I see the raw packets and analyzed them. Tens of thousands of them.
The attack actually lasting only minutes at most.
Only after would notification of end users be considered. You don't rebuild the house while it's still on fire, you put the damned fire out first.
You also don't shut down a Fortune listed company network that's performing critical services for governments and corporations over a modest network breach, that's how you shut down entire nations.
The organizational flaw, accepting modest attacks until a couple of Sarbanes-Oxley audits, as financial servers were being breached and copied by a foreign advanced persistent threat.
The entities involved remains classified. The attack was actually publicly reported long ago.
The fun part? This is happening every day, all day, all night.
And I'm not changing my SMS habits, as I don't transmit my PII in unencrypted form - ever. It goes by encrypted e-mail or encrypted e-mail attachment. Otherwise, well SMS is pretty much like skywriting, it can be received unencrypted over the air with a standard microwave antenna and receiver.
Biggest players, China, Russia, Romanian gangs that contract to foreign powers and just rip people off, Iran, Cuba, generic annoying people that have a vague clue, bored kids, of course every major Western power as well and some numbnuts in an internet cafe in Gabon or something. The gangs and larger nations being a wee bit better, by both skills and number of players working.
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@soldier1stclass987 note that every type people are claiming to miss also used SMS/MMS messaging, off of the very same servers, utilizing the very same protocols, hence equally exposed - the servers were compromised, not the handset devices, aka phones.
All SMS/MMS data is received, processed and stored on the servers and only locally buffered by the local handset devices.
The only reason that they released the warning on the top two operating systems is simple enough, there aren't that many users that utilize the obsolete more more primitive devices and frankly, who is more likely to have sensitive data that a foreign nation would be interested in, a smartphone user or Mrs O'Lady, who's 93 years old?
Now, some commented on a specific protocol that Google lead the way on, but Apple refused to get involved with or even offer their own offering. They've got a very valid point that is on target. Had the SMS/MMS platform been encrypted, especially for data at rest, this would entirely not be a problem, as the ones compromising the data would then have to decrypt millions of data sessions on at minimum of device pair by device pair basis, turning the entire exercise into an exercise daunting to even the best supercomputer in the world, to put it mildly.
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