I feel some sympathy for non-computer people using computers. To narrow that down a little I am referring to the error messages some applications provide when something goes wrong. For that matter I feel even more sympathy for IT professionals faced with an error message that tells them nothing or the wrong thing.
For the average person the solution is to call someone, usually a niece, nephew, younger child etc. to help them out. This person will come over, look at the screen and ion varying shades of derision point out that the reason is clearly printed on the screen and if they had read it they would have known what the problem was and how to fix it. There is a logic issue with the last part of that logic but I have heard it enough to know it is at least common.
For the IT professional the situation is different. They read the error message and based on what they are being shown go through a series of steps to chase it down. The quickest one is to Google the message, verbatim. The logic is that someone somewhere will have some across the same error and worked out a solution. This works sometimes depending on how explicit the conditions are that generate the message. For the average say SQL Server error message there can be half a dozen reasons why. If not successful the next step is to try and see if the vendor has some suggestions. The problem with this approach is that vendors don’t want to admit there are problems with their software and will minimise the amount of error information available. Microsoft is a little better than some in this regard because so many people now use their products so they need to have some info available either through official MSDN documents or their forums.
So why am I waffling on about errors today? Yesterday I spent an hour tracking down a series of scheduled job failures on a SQLServer instance. Some jobs worked, some didn’t, mostly the reindexing and defrag ones. I looked at the job histories, looked for conflicts, looked at the system log and so on. Checked the MS documents and looked at some of their solutions until I finally noticed the words write error in one message. Then I looked at the disk space and saw it was very low, too low to allow the jobs to finish. Was there a single place that check for low disk space appeared in any document on the error message, of course not.
I also noted with interest this week that some of the hackers associated with Anonymous were snapped up in a series of coordinated raids by various world authorities. A friend of mine is a hacker tracker. Organisations use him to trace and track down hackers that have done something to their systems. I once had a conversation with him where he rated hackers from 1 – 7 in their abilities. He said that those in 1-4 were easy to find, level 5’s were harder and they needed to make a mistake. Level 6 was more of a case of blind luck and level 7’s were all but impossible to track down.
With the technologies available today the 6 and 7 types are careful, don’t brag about their achievements and rarely even cross communicate with their group. They use tools that mask their activities, misdirect any investigation to another person or place and in some cases are protected. This is why country sponsored hackers cannot be found. They have access to the middle of the system where they can inject their wares not from a node as such but right into the stream a bit like tapping into the phone network, once the cables are removed there is no way to tell where the signal came from.
Consider a very simple example. When you send an e-mail it goes from your machine to an SMTP pool and then onto the destination. The header and source information is added by your client application so it can be traced back to you device. If a program is written to drop correctly formatted e-mails directly into the SMTP pool then the source information can be set to anything you want from a security guard to the president. With no real source how can this be tracked back. Expanding this concept a good hacker will use similar techniques to mask where the action or event originated making it very difficult to track.
A good hacker will also not have a signature. Many hackers like to include something to uniquely identify them. This is typically a handle or signature of some kind but it can also be an image or a phrase. This allows investigators to identify patterns of behaviour and a possible central point to start looking. The best hackers are anonymous J.
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So how many times did hackers break into NASA systems last year? Twice, three times? No it was an embarrassing 13 times and that is the “full functional control” count. Some of the attacks got into some important systems. Some were foreign nations trying to get new technology information. NASA spends about four per cent of its IT budget on security. Even so they had over 5000 security incidents where malware was found on NASA systems. Direct cost to NASA is estimated at $7m. Loss of data has no real price tag.
The worst incident was when someone traced to an IP address in China got into the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Others targeted personnel information. While this doesn’t sound so bad the info could have been used to get access to other systems. There is a lot more to this story but the main point is that if groups can get into NASA they can get into a lot of other places as well.
We you would think that but just because it is NASA we are talking about doesn’t mean they get everything right. They still for example let James Hansen run their GISS unit and produce bad data used to support his global warming campaign. With government encryption on mobile devices running at just over 50 percent on mobile and portable devices NASA runs at about 1 percent. The agency has managed to lose a large number of portable devices including the unencrypted notebook that contained command and control codes for the International Space Station for example. Others had social security numbers, data on the Constellation and Orion programmes and other gems. I guess rocket scientists are not that careful after all.
Those of us who are really old, in computer terms, remember the first pub or computer arcade game, Pong. It was a couple of flat paddles that bounced a square ball back and forth until one person managed to get it past the other enough times to win. It also had a couple of electronic beeps but that was about it. That was 40 years ago. The engineer, Allan "Al" Alcorn built it based on Atari’s (another old computer maker) Nolan Bushnell. In truth Pong wasn’t the first, predated by Computer Space and Odyssey, but it was the first one most people saw and it was very easy to play; hence popular in pubs and bars. The hardest part according to the engineer? Building the outer plastic case.
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