• @[email protected]
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      466 months ago

      By remotely I don’t think they meant a long RJ45 cable connected to nothing.

      So this doesn’t look like a setup that can be fully secure.

      Could even be completely fake and just to dissuade China from invading.

    • @[email protected]
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      6 months ago

      So long as it’s fully independent and disconnected from existing digital infrastructure it should be safer.

      It’s a puzzle, because anything with too many safety features can be easily disarmed. But anything with too few can be prematurely detonated.

      Imagine what happens to the Taiwanese economy if there’s a Chinese feint or false alarm and the facility bricks itself. A massive economic downturn would not work to the benefit of an island so heavily reliant on foreign trade.

    • @[email protected]
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      66 months ago

      That’s what you have to do of you don’t want the invaders to get the tech. If you brick the processors they still have the machines. I’m not sure what the secret sauce is in this case, but china has a reputation of reverse engineering things in spite of foreign laws. The best way to keep it from happening is to make sure they get no part of it.

    • @[email protected]
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      26 months ago

      state actors have hacked airgapped equipment before, an actual backdoor will be ripe for exploitation.

        • @[email protected]
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          6 months ago

          remember the stuxnet botnet, and how nobody knew what it was for?

          turns out it was programmed to activate in the very specific conditions inside the iranian nuclear reactor facilities and sabotage it. the facility was airgapped but stuxnet was so ubiquitous in the country by then, someone just needed to bring the first usb stick in for it to be a pwn. or so goes the story.

          iirc the us and israel admitted to doing it years later, it was somewhere in the obama era and they wanted to sabotage iran’s nuclear program. the systems remained infected for years reporting bogus data and slightly messing with the parameters so it never worked well and their scientists remained stumped until the virus was discovered.

          shows how vulnerable our systems really are to organizations with unlimited money.

            • @[email protected]
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              16 months ago

              So? Those backdoors have been closed since 2010 (probably earlier). Also not too many people have an Iranian Nuclear program.

              • @[email protected]
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                56 months ago

                The experts don’t share your optimism.

                In the same report, Sean McGurk, a former cybersecurity official at the Department of Homeland Security noted that the Stuxnet source code could now be downloaded online and modified to be directed at new target systems. Speaking of the Stuxnet creators, he said, “They opened the box. They demonstrated the capability… It’s not something that can be put back.”

                Dealing with Stuxnet has probably advanced Iranian cyberwarfare capablilites by several orders of magnitude that they wouldn’t have otherwise. That’s the problem with using this stuff as weaponry - they don’t explode.

    • @[email protected]
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      16 months ago

      disconnected from existing digital infrastructure

      Oh come on… this isn’t just a scrap metal press.