Posted on 07/20/2024 4:41:56 AM PDT by blueplum
A teenage boy may be responsible for a ransomware attack that shut down MGM Resorts in Las Vegas last year. The West Midlands Police Department in England confirmed that they arrested an unidentified 17-year-old on Thursday from the town of Walsall ...The attack happened on Sep. 12, 2023 allegedly with a simple 10 minute phone call to a Help desk employee using information obtained from LinkedIn....
(Excerpt) Read more at engadget.com ...
Speaking of which, I hope that whoever or whatever is behind the IT outages yesterday is found and brought to justice.
That was just a dry run for the upcoming election.
These random people like to misuse electrons so much, hook them up to old sparky and give them a ten minute dose.
That boy has a bright future in one of America’s alphabet agencies!
It has been attributed to a bug in third party antivirus software from Crowdstrike, that is popular with corporate and government clients. The fix requires someone with admin privileges log onto each machine and remove the offending software “by hand”. Crowstrike is the company that the DNC used to “investigate” (i.e., cover up) the software hack attributed to Russia in 2016. They did not want to turn their computers over to the FBI.
“I hope that whoever or whatever is behind the IT outages yesterday is found and brought to justice.”
After the fall of the Soviet Union there was a period of approximately thirty days when most big internet assaults stopped. Everyone was amazed and thought that maybe they’d just stopped. But then they started again, and they were tracked to a skyscraper on the same block as the military intelligence building in Beijing. A huge number of the scams, computer hostage situations and frauds are actually state sponsored. North Korea, Russian, China and a host of smaller nations where the frauds may not be part of the government but all those places host attacks against the West. It’s not something fueled by ideology. It’s just that those governments are more akin to the Mafia than they are to governments. (Rather like the original Star Trek episode where the entire planetary government was modeled after a book on the Chicago gangs of the twenties.) Note the number of former Russian oligarchs who fall out of windows, in Moscow in the winter when, of course you have the windows open.
Our government pretends none of this is happening because dealing with the states in trade is very profitable. As for the stupid saps who click on dodgy links promising riches, well, that’s their fault. My point is, unless these attacks are originating on Western soil, nothing bad will happen to the perpetrators. When the attacks were originating in Moscow, they went on from eight am to five pm. Does that sound like the guy was doing it from his basement while wearing just his underwear?
A 17 year old shuts down a major corporate for nine days! Some computer security company should hire him!
“Speaking of which, I hope that whoever or whatever is behind the IT outages yesterday is found and brought to justice.”
It wasn’t a hack, it was an upgrade.
Yesterday was the fault of a software engineer who signed off on an “update” without checking about interactions with existing software on servers.
It was not a teenage hacker. Some people did not follow procedures.
This is not the first time Crowdstrike has caused huge damage to this country:
this article is about the MGM Resorts ransomware incident from last year :)
My bad. I had different pest in mind.
NOTHING is off the table, now!
Well i guess he can claim that ai made him do it
“Crowstrike is the company that the DNC used to “investigate” (i.e., cover up) the software hack attributed to Russia in 2016.”
That’s not accurate:
Crowdstrike’s findings did NOT support the DNC claims - to include Mueller (his 2019 report) and the IC in general - of a Russian hack and, on that basis - ahem - DNC refused to turn over their server to the FBI for analysis to validate the claims of a Russian hack.
There is no evidence of Russian interference in the election, as the IC and democrats claimed, nor of a ‘coverup’ by Crowdstrike.
If you have evidence of a coverup by Crowdstrike, post it.
“It has been attributed to a bug in third party antivirus software from Crowdstrike”
That, too, is inaccurate. It was not a ‘bug in software’, but a defective software update.
The update was automatically applied to computers worldwide, and the Crowdstrike ‘update’ was allegedly untested.
Kid will be offered a job with the NSA.
I was at an executive committee meeting once, long ago, and heard a delightful story from a gentleman from Bell Labs while sitting in his living room decorated with a long thread carpet in which a crocodile appeared to glide.
There had been a software glitch that caused a computer on a ship to fire at another American ship. While quickly recognized, it had to be fixed. The programmer was awakened in the middle of the night, brought to an official car in his pajamas and hustled to an airport where he was put into a helicopter and winched down to a ship. He was told he HAD to fix the bug. He did, and wondered how they were going to return him home.
They explained that they weren’t. Even though he gave them the fix code, they insisted on dropping him on EVERY ship that needed the fix personally. He was a long time getting home. I don’t remember if he was still in pjs.
I worked with a guy who fixed an elevator on an aircraft carrier. Not a complicated or difficult fix, but he knew how to fix it. They had a special flight to put him on, but took him off space available. He was an hourly guy, not salaried, so he was being paid time and a half from the minute he left home until he got back.
I worked with a guy named Ken Olsen (not the founder of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), and not a relative of his) at Raytheon Wayland, about five miles south of DEC world HQ. He was also hourly. One day they flew him out to Beale AFB on a corporate jet to fix a problem on the PAVE PAWS station there.
Do you remember those wonderful stories of delivering software to alphabet agencies on street corners?
Or the forms asking if you needed a fork lift truck available when delivering your compiler?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.