99 countries. They locked doctors out of their computers. This is a new low. Wtf There's a whole lotta blame to go around and just like everything else in the news you're probably pissed/shocked/horrified and most importantly feel helpless. But it's different this time. There's not much we can do about climate change or that shyster in the White House (& his spineless defenders in Congress) directly. But there is something we can do about cyber security. It touches everybody. Was your university or workplace hacked?Know someone whose identity has been stolen? How many data protection plans are you under right this moment? If you're like many people, you likely have multiple credit monitoring agencies scanning your transactions (free of charge-- because the college/big-box retailer who dropped the ball doesn't want to get sued.) Getting everybody & every organization vigilant & on-point about security as a top priority could help make this insanity stop. (Fun fact: with those "free" data protection plans, Experian sells your info to third parties for marketing purposes") You know how security experts always say most people are dumb and don't pay attention to security or do their backups? Or that they maybe ought to *consider* using a passwordo manager? This cyber security Pearl Harbor **could** be an easy-to-digest event that finally knock sense into senseless (& clueless) institutions & organizations. Want to be a super hero? Contributing to strong cyber security is how you can save hospitals, protect dissidents, rescue people who don't need extra hassle (ex. somebody in Tanzania is figuring how to unlock his professor-dad's laptop tonight: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14326439 ), and prevent general annoying bullshit from happening. World kinda sucks right now, this is particularly awful (and not over.) But unlike other crises/disasters, you can do something about this. What can you do? 1. Get your act together, for real this time: set up TFA, use a password manager, regular updates, backups) 2. If you're a genius, find and report vulnerabilities, contribute to gnarly security internals & open source and white hat as much as possible 3. Be irritating: never let sloppy security practices slide on your team. If you see something, shake the cage. (If you're managing people, encourage that behavior) 4. If you've got time, help beef up "soft targets" who are almost certainly outgunned bc they're busy being wonderful human beings (ex charities, nursing homes, elementary schools, etc) 5. If you've got money, donate to bug bounties or become a patron to open source maintainers 6: If you've got a "brand" (or a loudmouth social media presence) do something valuable and makes you look good: keep talking about cyber security and make it relatable & actionable to general audiences It won't be a panacea, but finally this one problem in this world we can actually do something about
amen
Tl;dr
Maybe the government could spend resources on improving security instead of building powerful exploits which they can't keep secure.
The private sector builds working security. The government is what pushed hospitals into a technical backwater via overregulation.
The government (NSA) built the exploit being discussed.
Blame the NSA.
Tl
No one cares, will be forgotten tomorrow
0. When patches are published, install them.
snapshot backups
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this is the longest post ever
Right? I'd skip reading it again if I were interested a bit more...