New Strange World

Hacktivism

Like it or not we're in "Interesting Times" indeed. . . The loosely-connected hacker activist collective known as Anonymous have been attacking Russian cyber properties wherever they can. Russian government Twitter accounts have been astroturfing fake news and propaganda items about the Ukraine. People who maintain 'open source' software modules and software suites have planted logic bombs in their software. 

Unfortunately sometimes this hacktivism has created problems for non-combatant computer systems, but I'm going out on a limb and say that there will always be collateral damage of some sort, and some companies really bitched but look - even I can see that there are going to be hacks and some of them might have unintended consequences and therefore I've got things as backed up as a private individual on a shoestring budget can attain. 

But I'll always back hacktivism because it's a popular vote rather than anything on Party lines, and besides, you need to be sure you're secure from ANY attack when your work involves data as sensitive and important as that supposedly was. 

The Guy Fawkes mask these days signifies Anonymous but they
took it as a symbol from the movie "V For Vendetta"
- which was about bringing down a Fascist regime.
Talk about relevant.

Also - and relevantly - since the attacks on Ukraine, it turns out that a lot of software has had updates hacked to damage Russian and Belarusian computer infrastructure. There purports to be a spreadsheet out there that details 20-something pieces of software that have had hacks introduced via the normal updates and that target Russian infrastructure. 

Back and Future

There are a lot more articles out there which undoubtedly bear on this post of mine - people using AI software to develop better weapons, others developing better and better deep fakes to propagandise one side or the other, and hackers outside the Anonymous collective are taking sides and are really fierce about their support of each side. 

There are definitely going to be collateral damages in that war. You or I or our neighbour may be affected by some hacktivism or similar, directly or as a result of that attack on another system we depend on. The best thing you can do is tinplate your arse. Make backups of anything important right now, any way you can and keep that backup safe. 

That complaint about the software developer before - it runs a bit like this: "... person ... work for a US-based organization ... server in Belarus, 'resulted in executing ... code and wiping over 30,000 messages and files detailing war crimes committed in Ukraine ...' " and again - it's not effing rocket science that there WILL be hacks and therefore you need to keep your ass tinplated and this "US-based organisation" needs to re-evaluate their attitude to security.

You'd think we had plenty of intimations that hackers could do some damage for the last twenty-five years from movies like Wargames, Hackers, and the whole hacker movie genre. 

Now we have exactly such situations with individuals, groups, collectives, and State groups all busily hacking the shit out of everything and anything - think about Stuxnet that was repurposed to attack centrifuges in Iran's nuclear program. And that was now twelve years ago that it was discovered and probably fifteen years since it's predecessor was programmed.

Will we ever just LEARN from stuff in the past instead of having to re-learn it to our chagrin? 

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