TechLetters #147 - No cyber operations in Israeli crisis so far. Imaging divisions a frequent victim of ransomware at hospitals. AI energy footprint. Software issue and gas cut.
I have a talk on 22 November at 14:30 on the various tech-policy-legal aspects and facets of cyberwarfare. At King’s College London’s War Studies Dept. This Wednesday (18.10) I speak at hack.lu.
Security
Cyberoperations/attacks in context of Israel crisis are incomparable with Ukraine. Some hacktivist/etc groups announced their alignment and “activities” but nothing indicates that it would be impactful, or even measurable at all (the classification I use in my book would place it on the lowest, if at all). In other words, hold your horses and know the proportion. In case of Ukraine we had significant operations prior to the conflict. We also had an unprecedented one during the beginning (KA-SAT satellite internet modems disruption, no space infrastructure affected, of course), and plenty of others following. What’s happening in Israel does not indicate, at least at this moment, that any analogy or similarity occurs. In other words, know your proportions!
What happens after a ransomware/cyberattack event at a hospital’s imaging division. Prolonged downtime. “40 days of operating under downtime protocols, the successful cleaning and reimaging of over 5000 infected personal computers was accomplished”.
Mitigating huge DDoS attack. From Google. HTTP/2 Rapid Reset technique.
The story of SOCKS5 heap overflow in curl. Here, technical. “Yes, this family of flaws would have been impossible if curl had been written in a memory-safe language instead of C, but porting curl to another language is not on the agenda”.
Blind signatures, standardised. That's an exciting cryptographic construct and now it's standardised to be used in practice! Expect to see more of this privacy-preserving construct. "This document specifies an RSA-based blind signature protocol. RSA blind signatures were first introduced by Chaum for untraceable payments".
Privacy
Technology Policy
Energy footprint of AI processing is rising. Paper.
Other
Natural gas supplies (so heating down) to the island of Jersey cut off. For few days after a software fail triggers the main system to fail. Caused a power failure at the plant. Not a cyberattack but "rogue code". It's now restored).
In case you feel it's worth it to forward this content further:
Subscribed
If you’d like to share: