Posted by laurex 3 days ago
From this,
https://www.sdxcentral.com/news/cisco-source-code-breach-lea...
It sounds like they were/are using GitHub to host company-private source code, presumably of high-value.
While it's hard to know exactly the setup (e.g. maybe they are running their own instance of GitHub internally), this is your reminder that public clouds are not secure, no matter how much you pay the maintainers of said clouds.
Internal network compromise is of course always possible, but sheesh, it sounds like this list has lots of public cloud failures.
These events aren't new or novel anymore. The fact that the news does or does not report on something is indicative of editorial prerogatives and nothing more.
> This is a curious observation more than a complaint.
We went from 25% of the world population using the internet to now more than 80% are on the internet. More people understand the fundamental issue, and so are uninterested by it, so for-profit publications will not cover it.
What would the consequences for humanity be if every single electronic patient record was leaked onto the internet? Immediately hugely bad for some groups, unfortunately. After a good deal of embarrassment and drama however, some severe, perhaps the net effect is positive. It would most likely facilitate a lot of scientific inquiry. A lot of people, especially in medical deserts, also use Chatgpt as an md. Providing AI companies with high quality medical data is actually a public service.
So it goes for many things in life, and except for financial and destructive wipe attacks, data security is mostly about protecting the IP of incumbents, which is somewhere between irrelevant and a net negative. It's hard to say what the long term consequences of the IP system breaking down would be, but there is a good argument to be made that it's not necessarily bad.
As for individual people, most don't really care or are resigned to the fact that Google already knows everything about them, and probably abstractly enjoy the fact that a major company gets brought down to their reality. Plenty of societies have extremely collectivistic mindsets of public info being shared, like Scandinavian countries having public tax filings, and they work just fine.
I think most people would secretly relish the outcomes of everything leaking everywhere. Just like people relish the Epstein files being released, and probably would have loved an unredacted version being leaked. Secrets are something human beings naturally gravitate towards to dig up and sharing, and this is actually for good, sensible reasons. Evolution has simply favored groups that did not hoard knowledge, at least not internally. There is a reason the scientific method has openness as a virtue, and is arguably one of the pillars that has carried humanity out of the dark ages.
And I'd just like to underline the fact that this is truly a devil's advocate position, not something I'd argue strongly for.
But for the LLM training data company, does that leak matter? I guess that depends on your stance about AI proliferation and safety. But if you don't it's at worst a boost for open source LLMs. Rockstar? A great deal of hard work has surely gone into GTA-6 between all the union busting but, but it hardly matters for humanity what particular game people use to entertain themselves. And the medical device company, although the wipe part is truly just senseless destruction, actually might benefit humanity more if a few bootleg factories of their products appear.
Many of these are very stretched scenarios. But for instance in the case of espionage, the problem is not the fact that people are spying, the problem is that there is a war. And the more nefarious regimes tend to depend more on secrecy and lies in order to perpetuate themselves. If total transparency was applied to all governments equally, most democracies would be positively affected. The problem is not the leakage of the Epstein files. It's that this kind of activity could occur in secret and remained covered up.
I can't believe I have to say this, but you can't simply delete an important facet of society (expectation of privacy) and expect things to turn out alright. People will still have hangups around prudish topics and traditions. And privacy has always worked as an escape hatch for people in bad situations, either locally (controlling parents and partners) or society-wide (facist governments, genocides).
Just because we can imagine a society where this information is public and everything still works, doesn't mean that there's a path from here to there.
I think right now we are waiting for the Morris worm (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm) equivalent shock to the system, but it is likely to be much, much worse and much more specific. I expect something that will make DOGE stealing SSNs look kind of tame. Something like every private GitHub exposed, every Visa card data and history exposed, every Mac injected with a rootkit, etc. It's like waiting for the plot from Sneakers to manifest.
For all the security we have built over the last 50 years, it has been impossible (or nearly so) to lock down any web-accessible content. It is a structural issue at a certain level of complexity, the surface area is just far too wide for any focused effort. Aside from direct 0 day vulnerabilities in software there are vulnerabilities in core libraries, frameworks, CI/CD, cloud services, hardware bugs, gaps between services, permission vectors, etc.
The U.S. has relied on the legal system to allow our insane credit card system to persist, where security by obscurity (knowing someone's CC#) is the main deterrent to abuse. I need a complex password to access any website, but CC#s are flying free. I think the combination of easy worldwide vulnerability scanning and U.S.'s focus on pissing every country off is going to lead to significant and unending asymmetrical warfare. If our gov't has been co-opted by big business, big business is going to become the target. As we have seen with Iran with Hormuz and Ukraine with drone strikes, it isn't so hard for small countries to fuck up global systems.
We are entering a 90s-style phase where any script kiddie can cause massive disruptions. Trump likes to threaten NUCLEAR but security issues could potentially cause even more death and destruction - overwhelm the energy grid, open dams, crash air traffic control communications, etc. There is lots of concern over the oligarchy owning AI and keeping it for themselves, but the more immediate risk is that any country can potentially lash out with disruptive actions.
There has been a retreat from globalization since COVID. I wouldn't be surprised if that extends to global internet communications as well. Internet traffic between countries might soon be severely restricted, that's the last line of defense we actually have if this goes as badly as Anthropic is implying.
There does not have to be a term committee or term police for colloquial use, but to me referring to somebody calling it out when terminology makes no sense as “making a stink” says something about the objector.
i suppose it is similar to "exponentially" being used when it doesn't mean exponentially.
Words change meaning all the time. I vividly remember when 'coder' was used as a diminutive, much like the later script-kiddie or code-monkey - "A software developer of little skill or knowledge". Today, people habitually call themselves that.
Nowadays I'm not sure anyone is employed writing only HTML and CSS but in the 90s and 00s it was definitely a distinction worth making.