Schneier on Security

tds • September 10, 2019 9:09 AM

Countries like the USA, Israel, Iran, European countries, Russia, China, North Korea, etc., probably have hacked hardware and software in other countries.

The greatest bang for the buck may be in hacking democratic elections. From a U.S. perspective, but relevant to other countries trying to preserve, or enhance, their democracies: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/09/friday_squid_bl_693.html#c6798459

From Thomas Friedman https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/09/opinion/trump-democracy.html

“Democracies used to collapse suddenly, with tanks rolling noisily toward the presidential palace. In the 21st century, however, the process is usually subtler.

Authoritarianism is on the march across much of the world, but its advance tends to be relatively quiet and gradual, so that it’s hard to point to a single moment and say, this is the day democracy ended. You just wake up one morning and realize that it’s gone.

In their 2018 book “How Democracies Die,” the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt documented how this process has played out in many countries, from Vladimir Putin’s Russia, to Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey, to Viktor Orban’s Hungary. Bit by bit the guardrails of democracy were torn down, as institutions meant to serve the public became tools of the ruling party, then were weaponized to punish and intimidate that party’s opponents. On paper these countries are still democracies; in practice they have become one-party regimes.”

Regarding NotPetya, from the original post (“‘OP'”)

“When the tense engineers in Maidenhead set up a connection to the Ghana office, however, they found its bandwidth was so thin that it would take days to transmit the several-hundred-gigabyte domain controller backup to the UK. Their next idea: put a Ghanaian staffer on the next plane to London. But none of the West African office’s employees had a British visa.

So the Maidenhead operation arranged for a kind of relay race: One staffer from the Ghana office flew to Nigeria to meet another Maersk employee in the airport to hand off the very precious hard drive. That staffer then boarded the six-and-a-half-hour flight to Heathrow, carrying the keystone of Maersk’s entire recovery process.”