Something about this statement screams that companies are setting themselves up for free money from big old gov'ment welfare titties. I keep seeing it pop up again and again and it only makes sense in that context.
Its the boogyman like terrorism. We need infinite money to fight the bad guys.
> I keep seeing it pop up again and again and it only makes sense in that context.
Not saying that these companies would turn down corporate welfare given the chance, but I’ll offer an alternative explanation: it shifts accountability away from the company by positing a highly resourced attacker the company could not reasonably be expected to protect against.
If you have a physical security program that you’ve spent millions of dollars on, and a random drug addict breaks in and steals your deepest corporate secrets people are going to ask questions.
If a foreign spy does the same, you have a bit more room to claim there’s nothing you could have done to prevent the theft.
I’ve seen a bunch of incident response reports over the years. It is extremely common for IR vendors to claim that an attack has some hallmark or another of a nation-state actor. While these reports get used to fund the security program, I always read those statements as a “get out of jail free” card for the CISOs who got popped.
I agree. I think what we are split on is purpose/intent.
>could not reasonably be expected to protect against.
Why not? If I'm hiring a cybersec thats probably in my top 3 reasons to hire them, if not them then who? Number one is probably compliance/regulation.
> “get out of jail free”
This is one of my red flags I also keep seeing. Whoops we can't do the thing we say we do. The entire sec industry seems shady AF. Which is why I think they are a huge future rent seek lobby. Once the insurance industry catches on.
> these reports get used to fund the security program
> I agree. I think what we are split on is purpose/intent.
I… don’t think so? Your original comment was that companies claim nation state attack as a way to get government funding. That has nothing to do with assessing blame for an attack.
> Why not? If I'm hiring a cybersec thats probably in my top 3 reasons to hire them, if not them then who?
If you think you as a private entity can defend against a tier 1 nation state group like the NSA or Unit 8200, you are gravely mistaken. For one thing, these groups have zero day procurement budgets bigger than most company market caps.
That’s why companies reflexively blame nation state actors. It isn’t to get government funding. It is to avoid blame for an attack by framing it as something they could not have prevented.
When I went through a tech school cyber security program (10+ years ago now) we were told that the situation was "If Canada wants to hack you, it is improbable you can stop them. If the US wants to hack you, they will. Therefore we will not be focussing on strategies to counter nation state actors." It was a forgone conclusion that you would lose against them. I imagine the situation hasn't improved much in the last ten years.
Maybe not feasible now, but maybe it could be feasible at some point in the future if things are built on top of seL4 , with similar techniques used to demonstrate that the programs in question also have some desired security properties, building on the security properties the kernel has been proven to have?
Of course, one might still be concerned that the hardware that the software is running on, could be compromised. (A mathematical proof that a program behaves in a particular way, only works under the assumption that the thing that executes the program works as specified.)
Maybe one could have some sort of cryptographic verification of correct execution in a way where the verifier could be a lot less computationally powerful while still providing high assurance that the computations were done correctly. And then, if the verifier can be a lot less powerful while still checking with high assurance that the computation was done correctly, then perhaps the verifier machine could be a lot simpler and easier to inspect, to confirm that it is honest?
Sure, every little bit helps. But, keep in mind formal verification isn’t going to prevent configuration errors, and it remains to be seen if, for example, automated verifiers can do anything like the sel4 proof at scale. sel4 is tiny compared to most other software systems. There will still be technical avenues to attack, and if those get closed off nation state actors will just go back to spying the old fashioned way.
> Something about this statement screams that companies are setting themselves up for free money from big old gov'ment welfare titties.
From the published CISA mitigation[0]:
A nation-state affiliated cyber threat actor has
compromised F5’s systems and exfiltrated files, which
included a portion of its BIG-IP source code and
vulnerability information. The threat actor’s access to
F5’s proprietary source code could provide that threat
actor with a technical advantage to exploit F5 devices and
software.
> Its the boogyman [sic] like terrorism.
Or maybe it is a responsible vulnerability disclosure whose impact is described thusly[0]:
This cyber threat actor presents an imminent threat to
federal networks using F5 devices and software. Successful
exploitation of the impacted F5 products could enable a
threat actor to access embedded credentials and Application
Programming Interface (API) keys, move laterally within an
organization’s network, exfiltrate data, and establish
persistent system access. This could potentially lead to a
full compromise of target information systems.
This is a mean-spirited interpretation of what happens when you claim nation state.
Generally the government (as of now) is not paying private (but maybe some Critical Infrastructure companies) companies to secure things. We are in the very early stages of figuring out how to hold companies accountable for security breaches, and part of that is figuring out if they should have stopped it.
A lot of that comes down to a few principles:
* How resourced is the defender versus the attacker?
* Who was the attacker (attribution matters - (shoutout @ImposeCost on Twitter/X)
* Was the victim of the attack performing all reasonable steps to show the cause wasn't some form of gross negligence.
Nation state attacker jobs aren't particularly different from many software shops.
* You have teams of engineers/analysts whose job it is to analyze nearly every piece of software under the sun and find vulnerabilities.
* You have teams whose job it is to build the infrastructure and tooling necessary to run operations
* You have teams whose job it is to turn vulnerabilities into exploits and payloads to be deployed along that infrastructure
* You have teams of people whose job it is to be hands on keyboard running the operation(s)
Depending on the victim organization, if a top-tier country wants what you have, they are going to get it and you'll probably never know.
F5 is, at least by q2 revenue[0], we very profitable, well resourced company that has seen some things and been victims of some high profile attacks and vulns over the years. It's likely that they were still outmatched because there's been a team of people who found a weakness and exploited it.
When they use verbage like nation-state, it's to give a signal that they were doing most/all the right things and they got popped. The relevant government officials already know what happened, this is a signal to the market that they did what they were supposed to and aren't negligent.
HN can be unnecessarily vicious when it comes to these situations. They have a very narrow slit in which they see companies because they extrapolate their understanding into the large corporation.
The attacker needs to find 1 fault in a system to start attacking a system, the company needs to plug ALL of them to be successful, continually for all updates, for all staff, for all time.
Having been on both sides of that fence, I dont envy the defenders, it is a losing battle.
> Having been on both sides of that fence, I dont envy the defenders, it is a losing battle.
Being on the defenders side, I would say it is not a losing battle.
It is a matter if convenience versus security: not using up to date libraries because it requires some code rewrites and “aint nobody got time for that”, adding too much logic to functions and scooe creep instead of segregating services, not microsegmenting workloads, using service accounts with full privileges because figuring out what you actually need takes too much time; and the list could go on.
I am not blaming all developers and engineering managers for this because they might not know about all the intricacies of building secure services - part of the blame is on the ops and security people who don’t understand them either and think they’re secure when they are not. Amd those folks should know better.
And third, hubris: we have all the security solutions that are trendy now, we’re safe. Do they actually work? No one knows.
There's huge incentive for nation-state level actors to recruit, train and spend oodles on extremely sophisticated hacking programs with little legal oversight and basically endless resources. I have no idea why you're incredulous about this.
If I were running a country practically my highest priority would be cyberattacks and defense. The ability to arbitrarily penetrate even any corporate network, let alone military network, is basically infinite free IP.
If there was some government program I was previously unaware of that pays organizations that were compromised by nation state hackers then I’m going to be upgrading all my networking infrastructure to F5 products and start reading up on BIG-IP migrations.
That is to say, sometimes nation state hackers _were_ behind the compromise. F5 is a very believable and logical target for such groups.
I don't believe Equifax received money, just a long list of demands to be allowed to continue as a viable business.
That it was a nation-state actor may have allowed them some grace, as it didn't result in individuals' details being wholesale sold on the dark web, and the fallout was most-likely a national security issue.
It would definitely have helped the CCP target individuals who were vulnerable to recruitment due to their financial status. Especially when combined with the Office of Personnel Management data hack.
Nation-states sponsored hackers make up a huge amount of known targeted intrusion groups. This is not some random company tilting at windmills, these are real threats that hit American and American-aligned companies daily.
Something about this statement screams that companies are setting themselves up for free money from big old gov'ment welfare titties. I keep seeing it pop up again and again and it only makes sense in that context.
Its the boogyman like terrorism. We need infinite money to fight the bad guys.