Yesterday we heard of another major supermarket freezer hack in Europe.
Today I read our NSW Health Department has been attacked
This sort of news is getting to be so frequent that I wonder whether we should conclude that internet security is not achievable.
There seems to be no security measure, or set of measures, that can be reliably implemented.
Is this a human failure, or is it perhaps impossible to secure computers which have internet access?
Maybe we should conclude that humans are simply not clever enough to secure computers, and hand the whole job over to AI?
It could not do any worse than our feeble attempts.
From what I read this hack was largely due to human error.
o Many controllers left the factory-set usernames and passwords unchanged.
o Not behind a VPN
o Not protect by a Firewall
o Exposed to the public internet, making them discoverable on IoT search engines
o Software or firmware out of date.
o Apparently no warning system if temperature went beyond a set limit.
So Cyber crime is like all other crime in one respect … it occurs because we are too lazy to lock the door or remove temptations?
What you report there suggests that security advice was ignored.
The health department case is similar. Someone left a file publicly viewable when it was supposed to be password protected.
In this case it is likely that security provisions were too complex and people operating the system were unable to follow all the rules.
It still seems to be impossible to get it right … regardless of the reason.
I was IT director of a large hospital, part of my job was going into the patient areas to work on the computer systems, the nursing and doctors had to share workstations and continually login in and out was never sucessful. So a common factor was just using a generic login which accessed all areas. But of course passwords then became an issue, solution they wrote it on a white board behind the nurse station in big letters so everyone could read it.