Thread

'We hacked the FBI:' Hackers say they have data on all FBI employees

817 points · 614 comments · spenvo

jacobgold · 1790110395 · focus · HN ↗
At this point, no one seems capable of keeping a large database safe. I assume all medical and biographical information that exists is in the hands of the major state actors.
China hacked 22.1 million records of US government employees:
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Office_of_Personnel_Management_data_breach" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Office_of_Personnel_Manag...
1. coldpie · 1790111715 · focus · HN ↗
  It is unthinkable to me that anyone believes there is such a thing as computer security after so many years of nonstop hacks and leaks. If you have a computer and it is connected to a network with access to the Internet, assume that computer is semi-public. Meaning, if someone was interested enough in accessing your computer, they could do it. Do not hook any computer with access to anything that would be devastating if it was made public to the Internet. Do not put anything that would be devastating if it was made public onto someone else's Internet-connected computers.
  For example, do not hook your goddamn water or traffic or electricity infrastructure up to the goddamn Internet, and then, do fire the guy who suggested it.
  The correct analogy for computer security is not locks and keys and doors and gates. It is a house in a floodplain. Your house will not survive the flood of it hits you. Do not store anything critical or irreplaceable in that house.
  1. josephg · 1790114976 · focus · HN ↗
    > It is unthinkable to me that anyone believes there is such a thing as computer security after so many years of nonstop hacks and leaks.
    Of course there is. For example, SeL4’s security and reliability proofs still hold in the world of LLMs. The problem is that most software isn’t written on that firm foundation. Instead, most software is made by people with the philosophy of “if it looks like it works, ship it”. You don’t get secure software by working like that, because security vulnerabilities aren’t visible.
    We - humans - know how to write secure software. Just like we know how to make safe aeroplanes. The problem isn’t that we lack the capability to make secure computers. The problem is we don’t have a culture of security. Secure software is - somehow - niche. And as such, it’s much more expensive. And nobody wants to pay.
    taurath · 1790119248 · focus · HN ↗
    > Instead, most software is made by people with the philosophy of “if it looks like it works, ship it”.
    I work in secure systems and it’s shocking how many people believe this - the incentives from management are all about it too.
    gchamonlive · 1790125162 · focus · HN ↗
    I like to think behind every Dev anxious to ship half baked software sits an omniscient middle manager with a vague idea of what the product was supposed to do, maybe
    Bluestein · 1790150475 · focus · HN ↗
    This will all of course end when our AGI lords lovingly manage everything /s
    gchamonlive · 1790164909 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    Bluestein · 1790165338 · focus · HN ↗
    Please note the sarcasm.-
    gchamonlive · 1790165821 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    Bluestein · 1790166161 · focus · HN ↗
    "All our base are belong to AGI" :)
    gspr · 1790150784 · focus · HN ↗
    It's worse: it seems like almost every developer on this very site is aspiring to be that middle manager, with LLMs as their underlings.
    We are headed for scary waters.
    asdf88990 · 1790154425 · focus · HN ↗
    Guess you don’t remember the days of ssl on login pages, ssl strip, exfiltering data via JavaScript prototype pollution, and a million other things like that.
    Only just when we started to have a resemblance of security we got agile and startups breaking things (making rubbish software to capture a few bucks faster) and now vibe coding and llm assisted hacking.
    The point of my, arguably rant, is that there is nothing new under the sun.
    gspr · 1790155685 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm not sure my worries are assuaged by thr fact that it's been bad before, too.
    TeMPOraL · 1790163377 · focus · HN ↗
    It should. We went through couple of cycles of "things are bad, inmates are running the asylum" before, and nothing of consequence happened. The world still goes on.
    It's not a guarantee this time will be the same - but it should temper the worry somewhat.
    lazide · 1790166680 · focus · HN ↗
    Uh, even the database with all the compromising information on everyone with a US security clearance got leaked
    Previously no one was dumb enough to put that in one electronic database - it was on paper.
    This is going to get orders of magnitude worse.
    TeMPOraL · 1790173559 · focus · HN ↗
    I thought security clearances are a dime a dozen, and "all FBI employees" list is full of administrative work and basically 80% mirrored on LinkedIn? (Yes, the remaining 20% - or however much - leaking is a problem.)
    lazide · 1790205318 · focus · HN ↗
    They are not a dime a dozen [<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Office_of_Personnel_Management_data_breach" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Office_of_Personnel_Manag...].
    gchamonlive · 1790163134 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    goonersallofyou · 1790172352 · focus · HN ↗
    We're already 20 miles off shore and in the typhoon.
    ChrisMarshallNY · 1790127048 · focus · HN ↗
    I believe the technical term is “Move fast, and break things.” MVP is a huge disaster. I can see it working for applications that don’t process PID, but only an idiot ships data handling software before it’s been dragged through a lot of testing. I tested my app for two years, before finalizing, and an LLM still found a couple of holes (minor ones, but ones I missed).
    After the DOGE debacle, I suspect that all the previously really secure stuff, is now out there, too. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if some of these leaks, came from that.
    FBI employee data is very bad.
    dasil003 · 1790131161 · focus · HN ↗
    The issue is that in consumer and enterprise software, move fast-and-break-things outcompetes secure-by-default every time. Critical infrastructure needs to have a different set of priorities, but it’s very hard because the expertise is so thin on the ground. Why would anyone with the expertise to make these calls bang their head against the wall trying to educate bureaucrats about these things for $150k a year when they can easily make multiples of that in big software companies that don’t own that level of risk.
    bch · 1790134233 · focus · HN ↗
    > but it’s very hard because the expertise is so thin on the ground.
    This might be part of it...
    > Why would anyone with the expertise to make these calls bang their head against the wall trying to educate bureaucrats about these things
    But I suspect this might be most of it: good engineering is boring (to the recipient). Preemptively solving problems gets no credit.
    generic92034 · 1790147257 · focus · HN ↗
    The incentives have to change. Any breach regarding PID should have fines as a percentage of revenue of the company. Any breach intentionally covered up and found out later by a third party should mean jail time for the C level. Yes, I know it is hard to make such laws "foolproof". And yes, in the current political and economical climate it will not happen anyway.
    mitxela · 1790160466 · focus · HN ↗
    EU has these laws
    lesostep · 1790155824 · focus · HN ↗
    The real problem is that even for companies that wish to pay more and wait more for secure-by-default can't easily tell the difference.
    The only solution I can come up with is some form of certification or paid code review from a third party. I know that at least for Windows prior to 7 Microsoft actually allowed some parties to come in and check the code/checksum on an air-gaped computer. We somehow moved to "trust more" in the last decade, and now we can trust nobody
    AlotOfReading · 1790162504 · focus · HN ↗
    I've yet to see any form of certification or paid code review I'd be willing to bet critical infrastructure on. And working in safety critical software, that's not for lack of trying. Good review is usually harder than building a working system and the asymmetry of offense and defense applies to anything you miss.
    parineum · 1790140690 · focus · HN ↗
    If DOGE is going to have an effect on network security, it's not going to be for many more years.
    ChrisMarshallNY · 1790147794 · focus · HN ↗
    Not really. It’s likely that the dumped (and compromised) data might contain things like keys and URLs that could be used to pry open other sites. Blackhats have become really good at following breadcrumb trails, and using “innocuous” clues to ascertain much more dangerous access.
    LLMs have been a huge force multiplier. Here.
    If that data got out (which probably happened within hours of the data being dumped to insecure storage), then it’s probably already been analyzed and used to leverage access.
    parineum · 1790197796 · focus · HN ↗
    That's an awfully exciting narrative you've spun.
    ChrisMarshallNY · 1790201444 · focus · HN ↗
    Not really. It's par for the course. I didn't say anything that isn't common knowledge.
    Why are you so interested in defending DOGE?
    noduerme · 1790150413 · focus · HN ↗
    It's not as if best practices aren't well documented, or as if CVEs don't come out every day, or as if the information is somehow unavailable to even the most junior devs to take basic security measures.
    Not all hacks are caused by pure negligence, laziness or stupidity, but most of them are. Even a little effort goes a long way.
    My grandfather spent a couple decades as a builder, ran a construction crew. Whatever the project was, he wanted to know everyone he hired personally was going to reinforce and report to him anything they had the slightest doubt about. "Always hammer in an extra nail" was basically his motto.
    What we do ain't that different. The difference is that when an apartment building collapses, it's bigger news than when a govenrment database does.
    josephg · 1790163317 · focus · HN ↗
    > The difference is that when an apartment building collapses, it's bigger news than when a govenrment database does.
    Also when a building collapses, people blame the builders. When software leaks user data, the engineers and companies face no repercussions.
    taurath · 1790202029 · focus · HN ↗
    Spain just put in place fines equaling to 30% of revenue for data breaches - that’s the only way to make companies care about it directly.
    duskdozer · 1790160547 · focus · HN ↗
    The incentives from society are all about it. What company has ever faced serious consequences for hacks or data leaks? A cheap fine is just an unlucky cost of business.
    TeMPOraL · 1790162672 · focus · HN ↗
    I'd argue the management has a point there; without a pressure to ship, nothing would ever get released, because computer security has not yet understood the basic concepts that every non-computer security work does:
    - nothing is, can be, or even should be 100% secure; the optimal rate of security incidents in society is not 0 (with apologies to 'patio11)
    - security is a simultaneous trade-off against costs and usability, and those two other factors are more important:
    -- security is achieved primarily through raising costs for attackers to beyond profitability, and reducing impact of such attacks (due to "not in isolation from the world" below, this also mostly translates to costs)
    -- if "properly secured" (in the current cybersecurity sense) product/service cannot fulfill its function anymore, then you may just as well not make it; either way, no point in paying you for security work
    - security isn't done in isolation from other systems and the world at large; "if this happens we'll go straight to filing crime report with the police" is perfectly legitimate security measure (even if it works somewhat less well on the Internet); similarly, "this is secured by us having insured against it" is also a valid solution to some security problems
    NooneAtAll3 · 1790171306 · focus · HN ↗
    what's patio11?
    k1t · 1790172352 · focus · HN ↗
    <a href="https://www.kalzumeus.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.kalzumeus.com/
    rolymath · 1790234676 · focus · HN ↗
    One of the winners of the HN pareto distribution lottery
    deaton · 1790180287 · focus · HN ↗
    As much as you're right, the attitude in most software development is not "lets make this as secure as reasonable," it is "lets make this barely functional and then move onto the next thing."
    Cpoll · 1790199546 · focus · HN ↗
    I don't think this is always true; mature security teams consider their threat models. There's just a lot of Schneier groupies in the field as well...
    taurath · 1790201927 · focus · HN ↗
    This is all fine and good and the sorts of conversations we were having on tradeoffs like any other engineering org. Theres always been pressure to ship, but now its that various pockets of AI Believers have popped up, egged on by a manic management, containing such beliefs that the code no longer matters, that it’s possible to move fast and fix it up later, human review isn’t important anymore, and that lines of code is a valuable metric.
    Those running projects with these beliefs are sputtering and producing impressive PoCs that struggle to make it into production - either through underestimating the amount of detail needed to scale, or often throwing away good practices in favor of letting LLMs handle tradeoffs that later make changes slow to a crawl.
    Theres plenty of good ways to utilize LLMs to speed things up, but so many teams got so incentivized by management to move fast at any cost that they’ve thrown out “load-bearing” good practices for software. That bet hasn't been paying off the way they’d hoped. It’s now clear that they thought they’d be able to massively downsize the engineering orgs. Massive token spend is giving very little RoI and now like other companies they’re trying to rein in the biggest spenders who are often not producing value.

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