Fibaro flummoxed, Georgia courts held for ransom, and more Between the plentiful beverages and copious amounts of meat, pretty much everyone in the US is hung over from Independence Day in one form or another, so let's jump right into the security news. When is a backup not a backup? When it's for hacked Fibaro smarthome gear The popular Fibaro smart-home system holds a cocktail of …
From the linked news report, it sounds more like the insurance company made the decision to pay the ransom to save themselves some money, and it cost the City just $10k.
The City IT Director may have been on the hook for allowing the incident to arise in the first place. Someone senior should be fired. But whether the responsibility lies with the IT Director or someone else, e.g. a Finance Director who refused to budget for DR & backups, is debatable.
The story and videos (if watching these, expect to see about ten video ads inserted), make it sound like this, but I'm not sure. It is possible that the insurance company made the decision, but it is also possible that the city made the decision and the insurance company simply covered part of the expense. If the decision was due to the IT person not wanting to do the work of a restore or not having taken backups responsibly while having the ability to do so, I would see firing them as a logical option. Oh, if anyone from Lake City IT is reading this, you're going to want to reimage anyway because ransomware can just sit there waiting for more data to be put in before locking again. Your television station didn't make it clear that you know that, so just to make sure...
Backup is job one for any IT director, even if there are budget constraints something else should be sacrificed rather that backup. Just in the normal course of events hardware fails, disks in particular fail all the time. Catastrophic events have to be planned for, a lightning strike could wipe out everything in a building. If you've planned for these events then you should be able to recover from anything. There should have been offsite backups going back years that could have been used to restore their systems, failure to do that should certainly be a fireable offense.
I concur in your argument, but most people whose job is hiring IT directors have different ideas. Keeping the systems up right now is their primary goal, plus getting new systems up as fast as possible. Thinking about the longterm is on the list but lower. At times, usually for financial reasons, backup plans are specifically left unfunded (no ability on the part of the IT director to reallocate funds to backup from something else). Of course, in that case, I'd at least have an improvised backup system, but I wouldn't support firing the IT director for a backup problem if this was proven to be the case. And then, there are those cases where someone does some misguided maths and decides that it might be cheaper to pay the criminals than to manually recover and a tech site says it's sometimes a good idea, which could also be a decision made by someone external to IT (though if that happened where I'm working, I'd protest the decision and make plans to leave. I admit, however, that these possibilities are unlikely to be the case in this situation.
The budget authority issue is real. Having worked for the public sector for a while, I can say that one thing you learn early on is "not all money spends the same." You can't usually shift money around, in many cases you can't make purchases without a formal bidding process, etc. It's all in the name of making sure there isn't even the *appearance* of taxpayer money being wasted or diverted. Private companies I've worked for were positively lax by comparison.
Fortunately, Kaspersky and Fibaro say the vulnerabilities have since been patched with no reports of attacks in the wild.
Patched or Reinforced Against Future Attacking of Leading Key Assets? If the Result is Stasis ...... Follow Beta AI ProgramMING Tales/Trails/Trials/Trips to Ultimate Temptations in the Heavenly Retreat of the Grandest of Lodgings.
It is always simply printed to enable most all to follow to see and enquire after .?
You surely can't reasonably expect AI Future Operating Systems to have any Semblance of Resemblance to All Present Mediated Programs/AudiVisual Remote Guidance Projects? That would surely be Crazy.
twas plan b stopped diving on obtaining 1st input expected 4ir went by water mestupid fcuk
>eco conseq shall flw
>. ltr caps off
>eco "you surely... ... cant be crazy"
>tinydrv you hit bullseye doc not bullshit. almost no srv can resist or sort out the colo(u)rs. helluva job, damned environment but tails up. respect.
numbers
-terrabyte
There is a LOT of this going on lately.
For the past week I've been collecting packet captures through a VPN using a trust certificate to decrypt encrypted communications on several different low-budget Android phones that install malicious apps without user intervention through a company in China that is used to (supposedly) push firmware updates.
Most all of the apps I've looked at communicate with HICHINA.COM just like the malicious Alcatel Weather app that was reported back in January. (Still no official word from Alcatel about that fiasco)
https://www.zdnet.com/article/malware-found-preinstalled-on-some-alcatel-smartphones/
More recent pcap files also show some several GET requests pulling in and executing JavaScript and executable jar files from yandex.ru and also one from Facebook's content delivery servers (fbcdn.net) even though there are no Facebook apps or SDK's in any of the installed apps.
(This however appears to be part of Facebook's "Calvery Logger" )
In just one 12 hour period there was over 4000 connection attempts as the phone sat idle overnight and over 150 Megabytes of mobile user data used.
What a sh!tshow
Well, if the database was open to Internet access, it wouldn't need to be compromised, it just needed to be accessed.
Have they found traces of access ? If not, then okay, there's plenty of stuff available that no one looks at because nobody knows about it.
Open government can be like that. Cue ‘scoop’ by eager young journalist countered by localgov saying ‘but it’s freely available’. We get that here in Scotland with the Unionist media pretending to have ‘uncovered’ stuff. It is tedious.
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