On 7/27/2019 10:22 PM, POSHLYAK wrote:
On 2019-07-28, Jean-David Beyer wrote:
On 7/6/19 4:36 AM, Nomen Nescio wrote:
A Florida city reportedly has fired one of its top tech
employees after officials were forced to pay $460,000 in ransom
to the hackers behind a cyber attack that disabled its servers,
phones and email accounts.

A friend of mine worked for a social services agency of our local
government many years ago. Some genius had the database of all the
necessary data in a single IBM IMS/DB IMS/DC system to handle all the
data of the entire state. At one point, they installed an update which
failed, and all the data were lost. My friend complained that all the
employees had to work nights and weekends to re-enter the previous
month's data transactions. During the daytime, they tried to serve their
customers (welfare, mostly).

I suggested that they just restore everything from the most recent
backup and then apply the updates from the journal tapes. (This was back
in the days of magnetic tape). I explained all this to my friend who
inquired as to why they were not doing this. It turns out that the
genius had turned off the backups because they took too much time and
they needed someone to change the tapes. So he saved a little money that
way.

But the welfare clients could not get their checks that month, many got
evicted from their welfare hotels, and had problems paying for food and
medications. I very much doubt the genius got fired.

I have a friend who works in security for a major US bank and the
things he tells me are frightening. First off, the Russians are
down on the list of potential hackers.

Number 1 is China by far.
Followed by North Korea, Middle Eastern countries and some of
the Slavic countries.
They get hammered 100's of thousands +++ of times per day by these countries
probing their infrastructure.

It's like the wild wild west out there.




I worked for a large pharmaceutical company. Thier IT department locked
down all of the company computers so only company approved software
would run, all data was on company servers.

EXCEPT, They forgot the DOS batch commands and batch files. The
"Obsolete" DOS commands could do about any thing you wanted on their
secure system.

--
Judge your ancestors by how well they met their standards not yours.
They did not know your standards, so could not try to meet them.