Security News for the Week Ending September 4, 2020

Centurylink Routing Issues Lead to Massive Internet Outage

Last Saturday night/Sunday morning, Centurylink had a bit of a problem, either taking down or severely impacting web site such as Cloudflare, Amazon, Steam, Twitter and many more. Just because a system was designed to stay operating in case of a nuclear attack does not mean that it is immune to human error or software bugs. Centurylink has not explained what happened. This particular attack nullified many business continuity strategies. If staying online is important to you, this would be a good time to review your DR-BC program. Credit: Bleeping Computer

The New Normal: Dell Says 60% of Their Staff Will Not be Going Back to the Office Regularly

We are seeing more companies saying that they do not plan to return to office life ever. Dell says that the majority of it’s 165,000 member workforce will never return to the office again or regularly. Dell says “work is something you do, an outcome, not a place or time”.

Ignore for the moment what this means for the commercial real estate market if this becomes the new normal.

That means a significant leap for your cybersecurity practices going forward. When the majority of your work is being done on a network, via unencrypted wireless through a router that was last patched in 2013, what does that mean for security? If that thought keeps you up at night, call us. Credit: The Register

Users’ Browsing Can Be De-Anonymized With Little Work, Researchers Say

Mozilla (Firefox) collected two 1-week browsing history datasets from 50,000 volunteers and were able to re-identify anonymous browsing data to the individual successfully. With users who only visited 50 web sites during that period, they were able to re-identify up to 80% of them. The odds improve when the researchers have more data. After all, who visits only 50 web sites in a two week period. Therefore, assume claims of data being anonymized with great skepticism. Credit: Help Net Security

US Federal Appeals Court Rules NSA’s Mass Surveillance Disclosed by Edward Snowden is Illegal

Seven years after Edward Snowden disclosed the existence of NSA’s mass surveillance program a federal appeals court said the program is illegal. In defending the program, the NSA pointed to one case where NSA surveillance data was used, but the judge overseeing that case says that the NSA’s information was not material. However, the same court said that the folks convicted in that case are still guilty so no getting off the hook based on that. Given the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on this program, the fact that the NSA can only point to one court case where the program had any effect should kill the program on effectiveness grounds anyway, but that it not the job of the court. I am sure the Republican administration will appeal this up to the Supremes, but they may or may not take the case, so stay tuned. Credit: Threatpost

Republican Plan to Ban Huawei Will Cost Americans $2 Billion

Now that the Republicans have decided (it is an election year) that Huawei is a national security threat (but wasn’t for the last three years), they have created a requirement to rip out and replace all of the existing Huawei (and ZTE) equipment that carriers are already using. The first step in this process was to ask the carriers well, how much will it cost to replace all that stuff. The carriers have come back with that initial estimate and it is $1.8 billion and change. Carriers are notoriously bad at estimating costs like this, so make it $2.5 billion or so.

BTW, I am not saying that the FCC is wrong, I just don’t understand why this wasn’t considered a problem in 2017 vs. two months before the elections.

Where is that money going to come from? There are really only two options – higher prices to customers and a taxpayer subsidy.

Curiously, the Republicans are complaining about a Chinese law that requires Chinese companies to comply with requests from the intelligence services and not tell anyone. If I was wearing a blindfold, that would sound exactly like the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act or FISA.

I have said for a long time that when it comes to telecom, the U.S. is basically a third world country (according to Wikipedia, we rank 30th in the world for mobile Internet connection speed). What the carriers will do in the short term is, except for really densely populated downtown cities, slow down the rollout of 5G Internet (Verizon, for example, only covers 5% of the population with high speed 5G – high speed means that a user can tell the difference when connecting over a 5G connection vs. connecting over a 4G connection). Other carriers cover more of the US, but with virtually no speed difference over 4G, but now, even that rollout will likely slow down.

This is a bit of a no-win situation and we will likely pay for it in (a) higher prices, (b) slower 5G rollout and (c) worse real 5G (meaning fast) coverage.

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