by Scott Shackford
Privacy and cybersecurity experts and activists have been warning for
ages that governments have their priorities all wrong. National
security interests (not just in America but other countries as well)
comparatively spend much more time and money attempting to breach the
security systems of other countries and potential enemies than they do
bolstering their own defenses. Reuters determined,
with the information from intelligence officials, that the United
States spends $9 on cybersurveillance and government hacking for every
$1 it sends on defending its network systems.
The "WannaCry" Malware attack that spooled out over the end of last week and into the weekend, implicates both sides of this problem.
The ransomware, first of all, allegedly originated from vulnerabilities
and infiltration tools developed by the National Security Agency (NSA)
they had been hoarding and keeping secret from technology companies
whose defenses they were breaching. All of this secrecy was to
facilitate the NSA's ability to engage in cyberespionage and to prevent
technology companies from building defenses that would have inhibited
government surveillance. The NSA lost control of these infiltration
tools and they were publicly exposed by the hacker group known as the
"Shadow Brokers" last month.
So this WannaCry attack or something like it (and probably many more)
was incoming, and attentive information technology specialists were
aware and hopefully prepared. Microsoft had already released a patch to
address the vulnerabilities. Except not everybody downloaded it.
The non-downloaders included parts of the United Kingdom's National
Health Service (NHS), the socialized, taxpayer-funded healthcare system
that covers the entire population there. The NHS had been warned that
computers using old Microsoft operating systems were vulnerable, but
several hundreds of thousands of computers had not been upgraded, according to the BBC.
So on the one hand, we have a government agency refusing to disclose
cybersecurity vulnerabilities it had discovered in order to take
advantage of them, potentially leaving everybody's computers open to
attacks. And then, on the other hand, we have a government agency
refusing to properly prioritize cybersecurity to protect the data and
privacy of its citizens (they blamed it on not having enough money, of
course).
Issues of concern to people who live in the west: property rights, water rights, endangered species, livestock grazing, energy production, wilderness and western agriculture. Plus a few items on western history, western literature and the sport of rodeo... Frank DuBois served as the NM Secretary of Agriculture from 1988 to 2003. DuBois is a former legislative assistant to a U.S. Senator, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Interior, and is the founder of the DuBois Rodeo Scholarship.
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