The 21st Century Question: Why network everything?

Bob_Church · April 28, 2018

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/school-district-pays-10000-bitcoin-ransom-after-cyberattack-massachusetts/

"A Massachusetts school district was waiting Friday for its computer system to be "unlocked" after it paid a $10,000 bitcoin ransom to hackers following a cyberattack on its system. And despite the nefarious nature of the school system's lockdown, there is no criminal investigation into the matter because solving this crime is "impossible," said Interim Leominster Police Chief Michael Goldman.”

Are we ever going to reach the point where the first response will be “why the hell was the information online? Why couldn’t it be on a LAN with no external link?"

This is getting silly. In a very dangerous way.

Bob_Church · April 28, 2018

We’ve had two or three, that I know of, major disasters at OU and in every single case the information was online as a minor convenience, if even that. The worst one, the one that changed everything and got good people fired and our IT people replaced with suits working for some outfit from out of town was a graduate student showing off to what has been confirmed, but only on the grapevine level, a young female student worker. In the Alumni department they had a computer where they entered the personal information of every person who donated to Ohio University. That, by the way, was the prime goal of our University President at the time, he fully admitted before all this that donation raising was his main duty. This information included name address and other personal stuff and the University will neither confirm nor deny that it had their credit card information. Although for some reason OU bought a one year subscription to one of the credit watch places for each person in there and told them to change their credit cards.
The young female student worker’s job was to take the information on new donors or donors giving again and walk over to that desk and enter it. And if anyone sent a request for certain information and it was legit enough to pass on to her she’d, again, walk all the way across the room and get that info. The grad student showed her how unnecessary all this walking was. The university had just been networked, this was all new terrain to most but he plugged an ethernet cable into the computer, configured it to be online than showed her how she could do all this from her own desk, why walk clear across the room? And he could even show her how to do it from home, nudge nudge wink wink. We know she didn’t take him up on the former and nobody believes she went for the second option either. Accessing the computer continued to be done by walking over to it. When these two graduated it left nobody on campus who had ever even known the computer was networked.
Until the FBI contacted IT and informed them that hackers had sucked every bit of information off of it.
President McDavis now had to send a letter to every person who had donated to the University saying “I would like to thank you again for your donations. It’s only with your generous help that we can educate our young people to become valuable citizens and I can’t tell you how grateful I am. We all are. Oh, and by the way…..”
Power Boothe liked to say that every time they came out with new technology the proponents would claim that it would revolutionize education. Radio would replace teachers. or Vinyl LPs, then TVs. But unfortunately the computer people have much much better salesmen than their predecessors.

PS no, not Powers, Power

https://www.powerboothe.com

ryoder · April 28, 2018