The below picture was taken at Ueno Zoo, Tokyo, Japan

his morning I published a short post about cybersecurity in Japan. A friend from Japan had sent that to me.

The work etiquette of Japanese people (or devotion to one’s job) is famous or notorious worldwide. People are willing to die for their country or job or company.

When cybersecurity incidents occur, and it seems like a growing problem in Japan, what would be the mental strain on IT workers?

Can one trust air crews?

HE BBC says that one pilot attacked another in a plane – reminiscent of what happened in Germanwing when one pilot locked the other out of the cockpit (the more senior pilot blocked) to crash everyone into a mountain.

That makes one wonder what happens to some (still) missing places like the one from Malaysia.

Crossposted from Techrights

Fake security is already breaking systems running GNU/Linux

ore complexity means more problems. Newer code means more bugs (e.g. Rust rewrites).

Fake security means catastrophe for no actual gain/s.

As noted by several sites [1, 2], linking to a bug report, kneeling to Microsoft came at a high cost:

TPM? Who asked for TPM in Linux? GAFAM? But who am I to even mention the principal culprits? I have degrees in computing, not in genetics.

A perk of living next to major facilities of non-military nature (datacentres [1, 2] are used for military)

think I neglected to mention a sort of “uptime privilege” this morning. I realised this only later. It’s a kind of an “RK” privilege one can forget about. You take this for granted when you’re next to international games or actions.

My computers have high uptime records owing to good electricity infrastructure (reliability/uptime/availability); we have a sort of fortune or the mere luck of having very reliable electric grid (near a very large and famous stadium) with persistent connections and decent hardware nearby, fallbacks included, with no natural disasters, not even floods (we’re in a slope).

In some parts of the world they have extreme weather this year, including prohibitive costs of living (UK minimum wage a lot higher than the average in Europe), war, conscription, and worse. Here, unlike Ukraine, no shelter time (or risk of being hit by missiles), is expected, so carrying on as usual is almost always possible. Until someone from another continent pays $130,000 to drag you down to London. But even then, your computers remain turned on at home.

The data can be used to defraud (e.g. impersonate) people who flew to and from Manchester Airport. Worse yet, it can potentially be leveraged for blackmail.

roups of tourists have gathered for the holiday around here, maybe anticipating the start of the football season. They’re typically quiet and polite people from Europe or east Asia. They choose to come to Manchester, not London, or sometimes both. They shop, stay overnight, and eventually leave to go back home.

Recently there was a data breach in Manchester Airport. Airports keep a lot of personal information about the people who fly and fliers cannot opt out because nobody can board a plane anonymously.

I certainly hope the computer systems at Manchester Airport were properly partitioned and did not use Windows. Every version of Windows has back doors and is a ransomware magnet.

To each its own

etting a solution to DDoS attacks is not easy because each time the pattern to tackle (without false positives) is a bit different and each incident can be unprecedented in one single site, so there’s no one-size-fits-all solution.

At the moment we combat another wave of nuisance bots and each time it comes there’s risk that everyone will be “away from keyboard” and therefore it won’t be detected.

here are cyber attacks against our Web sites this week. These attacks take several different forms. These are clearly censorship attempts. We have paper trail to prove that.

Any attacks – no matter their form – tend to indicate fear. In this case, the fear is that information that we published will be available and remain available for many years to come.

Sustaining attacks is one thing; reporting them is another. What’s happening is illegal. It will be treated as such.

We’ll carry on publishing as usual. Curtailing access to information is never a winning strategy for all sorts of reasons.