News recap
Unfortunately, I often lose track of events when they're no longer headline news, even important ones.
I'd not realised how long the situation in eastern Ukraine had been :( But apparently, it's mostly in the same situation, with several large areas controlled by separatists backed by Russia, with continued fighting but not a lot of movement in lines of control.
Everyone condemned Russia and instituted sanctions, but it doesn't seem to have made much difference :( I guess eventually, the current situation will be formalised. Unless someone offers military aid to Ukraine which might even be worse, more proxy (or not proxy) wars :(
I think I sort of knew that, but I wasn't really sure.
I looked this up while checking what happened under NotPetya, the malware that used the same exploit as WannaCry, but also sought administrator privileges on networks to spread throughout organisations. It seems it didn't go globally apocalyptic as it temporarily seemed it might. But was pretty bad in Ukraine. It was initially spread when a commercial accounting package widely used in Ukraine was hacked to include it in a software update.
That's scary in two ways. One, it was targeted at Ukraine in several ways. It superficially presented itself as ransomware, but actually just did damage, the "accept money and decrypt" stuff was half-arsed.
Secondly, most people don't have a good defence against a legitimate software update. Image if chrome were hacked, or windows! That's hopefully not likely, but if it were possible, and someone used a new exploit to subvert their software updates directly instead of spreading indiscriminately first, it could infect *incredibly* widely.
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comments so far.
I'd not realised how long the situation in eastern Ukraine had been :( But apparently, it's mostly in the same situation, with several large areas controlled by separatists backed by Russia, with continued fighting but not a lot of movement in lines of control.
Everyone condemned Russia and instituted sanctions, but it doesn't seem to have made much difference :( I guess eventually, the current situation will be formalised. Unless someone offers military aid to Ukraine which might even be worse, more proxy (or not proxy) wars :(
I think I sort of knew that, but I wasn't really sure.
I looked this up while checking what happened under NotPetya, the malware that used the same exploit as WannaCry, but also sought administrator privileges on networks to spread throughout organisations. It seems it didn't go globally apocalyptic as it temporarily seemed it might. But was pretty bad in Ukraine. It was initially spread when a commercial accounting package widely used in Ukraine was hacked to include it in a software update.
That's scary in two ways. One, it was targeted at Ukraine in several ways. It superficially presented itself as ransomware, but actually just did damage, the "accept money and decrypt" stuff was half-arsed.
Secondly, most people don't have a good defence against a legitimate software update. Image if chrome were hacked, or windows! That's hopefully not likely, but if it were possible, and someone used a new exploit to subvert their software updates directly instead of spreading indiscriminately first, it could infect *incredibly* widely.
You can also comment at http://jack.dreamwidth.org/1038125.html using OpenID.
comments so far.