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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
The U.S. Secret Service is investigating a breach at a Virginia-based government technology contractor that saw access to several of its systems put up for sale in the cybercrime underground, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. The contractor claims the access being auctioned off was to old test systems that do not have direct connections to its government partner networks.
In mid-August, a member of a popular Russian-language cybercrime forum offered to sell access to the internal network of a U.S. government IT contractor that does business with more than 20 federal agencies, including several branches of the military. The seller bragged that he had access to email correspondence and credentials needed to view databases of the client agencies, and set the opening price at six bitcoins (~USD $60,000).
A review of the screenshots posted to the cybercrime forum as evidence of the unauthorized access revealed several Internet addresses tied to systems at the U.S. Department of Transportation, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), a component of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security that manages the nation’s naturalization and immigration system.
Other domains and Internet addresses included in those screenshots pointed to Miracle Systems LLC, an Arlington, Va. based IT contractor that states on its site that it serves 20+ federal agencies as a prime contractor, including the aforementioned agencies.
In an interview with KrebsOnSecurity, Miracle Systems CEO Sandesh Sharda confirmed that the auction concerned credentials and databases were managed by his company, and that an investigating agent from the Secret Service was in his firm’s offices at that very moment looking into the matter.
But he maintained that the purloined data shown in the screenshots was years-old and mapped only to internal test systems that were never connected to its government agency clients.
“The Secret Service came to us and said they’re looking into the issue,” Sharda said. “But it was all old stuff [that was] in our own internal test environment, and it is no longer valid.”
Still, Sharda did acknowledge information shared by Wisconsin-based security firm Hold Security, which alerted KrebsOnSecurity to this incident, indicating that at least eight of its internal systems had been compromised on three separate occasions between November 2018 and July 2019 by Emotet, a malware strain usually distributed via malware-laced email attachments that typically is used to deploy other malicious software.
The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to requests for comment, nor did the Department of Transportation. A spokesperson for the NIH said the agency had investigated the activity and found it was not compromised by the incident.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday September 13 2019, @11:50AM (6 children)
What are we doing to deserve 5x more income?
Someone needs to make them first. There aren't enough such apartments now to make that possible.
(Score: 2) by legont on Friday September 13 2019, @05:07PM (3 children)
My personal productivity as a software engineer is up at least 10 times compared to 20 years ago. I am saving the work of dozens if not hundreds of low skills workers. Why other collect almost all the profit?
Note that this is not a complain. My bigger issue with the situation is that if I am not given the saved money, there is nobody to buy the stuff company produces. Therefore, they hoard money instead of manufacturing more, which leads to artificially low interest rates and high real estate prices and overall misery for everybody, including the guys with the money. There will be blood and rich children will hang off the trees. Do they really want it? No, but they can't stop doing it because everybody is doing it.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday September 13 2019, @10:09PM (2 children)
Does your employer agree? My take on this is that you agreed to this contract. That indicates to me that maybe you're exaggerating a little your value to the company in question.
You are your company's sole purchaser? Because otherwise there's a lot of potential purchasers that saved money goes to - your coworkers, vendors that the company buys stuff in turn from, or the increased spending that comes from the wealth your work brings in. It's definitely not going to some black hole to be lost forever.
Unless, of course, they don't do that. Most such recipients invest or spend the money. Not hoard it.
I see it also leads to non sequiturs since none of those things are consequences of what you claim is the cause. And the shared destiny thing at the end is just typical parasite logic. Nothing is ever all one-sided misery, not even complete extinction.
Unless, of course, those rich people moved out of the crazy countries first.
(Score: 2) by legont on Saturday September 14 2019, @12:21AM (1 child)
I've a suggestion for you. Forget your deep hate complex for a second. Reflect on "negative interest rates".
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday September 14 2019, @11:44AM
I've already forgotten such for a lifetime. A few seconds more should be pretty easy.
Non sequitur in several ways. This has nothing to do with hate complexes. And it certainly has nothing to do with your relative value to your employer. And given that there's no actual negative interest rates at present, it doesn't really have much to do with that either.
Reflect on what you really mean by "money hoarding". It means YOU DON'T GET THE MONEY. This is all an elaborate rationalization for why you deserve more and such.
(Score: 2) by legont on Friday September 13 2019, @05:22PM (1 child)
Only partially. We don't k now how much partially, but some are saying that more than enough apartments are bought by Chinese investors who don't dwell in there or at least don't produce any value locally. They only help to drive the prices up.
Again, a more pressing issue is under the radar. To make a place like NYC vibrant and intellectually productive, there should be a mix between rich and poor talents. New things grow in bars that are affordable to everybody.
This is broken. The city will have a huge crisis at some point and possibly almost die for a generation or two.
Currently most bright folks are taking buses for 2 hours to the office and, like myself, are dreaming of moving as far away as possible.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday September 13 2019, @11:17PM
Well, "some" need a two minute hate. Chinese investors make for a convenient target.