It isn't just the stuff of dystopian science fiction plots anymore. Thanks to a gov't that thinks the real threat comes from Tea Partiers, we're teetering on the verge of catastrophic cyberattacks from foreign enemies:
At first I was happy to see, "It's an AP investigation". But then I realized, "Oh, it's an AP 'investigation'".
Quoting: Some run on machines that use software that is so old that malware protections don't exist, such as Windows '95 and FORTRAN, a programming language developed in the 1950s.
At the Tennessee Valley Authority, a corporation owned by the federal government that powers 9 million households in the southeastern U.S., a former operations security expert said in recent years he saw passwords for some key operating systems stored on sticky notes.
"Some of the control systems boot off of floppy disks,"
None of this makes "hacking" easier. By and large, any hackers would (a) first need to determine what the heck they are hacking into, and (b) most hackers are young programmers who don't know what any of this stuff might be. Yeah, it's old, but no, it's not any more vulnerable to hacking than the latest Windows network OS.
Plus the hackers would need to wade through the decades of porn and malware that have accreted in those systems which act as an unintentionally unintelligible labyrinth of code.
At first I was happy to see, "It's an AP investigation". But then I realized, "Oh, it's an AP 'investigation'".
ReplyDeleteQuoting: Some run on machines that use software that is so old that malware protections don't exist, such as Windows '95 and FORTRAN, a programming language developed in the 1950s.
At the Tennessee Valley Authority, a corporation owned by the federal government that powers 9 million households in the southeastern U.S., a former operations security expert said in recent years he saw passwords for some key operating systems stored on sticky notes.
"Some of the control systems boot off of floppy disks,"
None of this makes "hacking" easier. By and large, any hackers would (a) first need to determine what the heck they are hacking into, and (b) most hackers are young programmers who don't know what any of this stuff might be. Yeah, it's old, but no, it's not any more vulnerable to hacking than the latest Windows network OS.
I think that you need to rethink that, after a reading of "Lights Out", NYT's bestseller by Ted Kopel.
DeletePlus the hackers would need to wade through the decades of porn and malware that have accreted in those systems which act as an unintentionally unintelligible labyrinth of code.
ReplyDeleteWe're very safe.