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from the instead-of-csv-files-we-should-use...xls? dept.
A Suezmax container ship can hold over 10,000 TEUs or “Twenty Foot Equivalent Units”. Most containers carried are double this length – FEUs or “Forty Foot Equivalent Units” – but that still means in the region of 5,000 containers.
Only around one third of that cargo is on-deck though – most is hidden in the holds, under massive hatch covers. To get a container out from the bottom of the hold could involve removing 50 containers from that hatch cover, removing the hatch cover, then taking a further 8 containers to access the bottom of a stack.
Screw up the load plan and you create chaos. What if the load plan, which is just a CSV list or similar, is hacked and modified? No-one knows what container is where. instead of taking 24-48 hours to load and unload, it could take weeks to manually re-inventory the ship. Time is money for a ship. Lots of money. Blocking a port for a period whilst the mess is resolved incurs enormous costs and could even jeopardise supplies to an entire country.
Seems like more bang-for-the-buck than an IED [Improvised Explosive Device].
(Score: 1) by anubi on Wednesday November 22 2017, @06:47AM (5 children)
Sounds very similar to a computer malware someone was telling me about once... long time ago.
What this thing would do is covertly hide in the background, wake up once in a while to go fish through the filesystem for excel and access files, go through them and randomly change a few digits here and there, then go away for several days.
Every few days, randomly, it would wake up and do it again.
It was using some sort of stealth technology where neither the folder nor the file would show up until you knew precisely what he named both the folder and the file.
Ever since I saw it, I have been extremely leery of trusting ANY operating system whose filesystem has been programmed with the ability to hide things from me.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 22 2017, @11:22AM (3 children)
You are aware that the DOS dir command had a documented option to also show hidden files?
If you cannot get a hidden file shown without knowing its name, then obviously it's a case of failing to RTFM.
Of course that assumes that those files were actually hidden through OS measures (as your description "operating system whose filesystem has been programmed with the ability to hide things from me" implies). If the files were hidden through the malware's own actions (e.g. by hijacking the DOS interrupt), that is, if the malware effectively acted as root kit, then you could not blame the operating system about it (not even about the missing protection against it, as unlike modern processors, the 8086 did provide absolutely nothing to protect against such things).
(Score: 1) by anubi on Wednesday November 22 2017, @12:12PM (2 children)
The DOS command I used for something like that was something down the line of "dir C:\*.* /as"
I am not for sure how he was doing it, but DOS would not show it... even if I did an attrib *.* -r -a -s -h on all files.
The only way you could find it is if you knew exactly where it was. Maybe it was some sort of unprintable character or something.
This apparently was not the plain old DOS "hidden file" attribute. It seemed to have something to do with something in Microsoft checking for something in the filename.
The dos "hidden" attribute seemed not for security, but to help eliminate clutter from showing system files when all you wanted to see were your data files.
Now, this was indeed a long time ago.... but just the thought of putting something out there that did this sent shivers all up and down me.
I remember expressing my concerns at work about this and getting dismissed like I was some sort of crackpot.
I figured when guys were that high up the salary ladder, they did not need to concern themselves with things like this.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 1) by anubi on Wednesday November 22 2017, @12:43PM (1 child)
Whoop, submitted before I completed my thoughts...
There is a distinct possibility that the machine could have been compromised in the way you indicated.... by hijacking some interrupts. If so, I was not aware of it as I do not remember booting up on a known good DOS disk to try to list things. I remember I used to have one disk drive with known good DOS boot and malware tracking tools on it where I had disabled the write logic, by physical surgery on the PCB, diverting the write command to do nothing but trip off a 74LS123 monostable with a piezo beeper on it... that particular disk drive was completely incapable of writing to disk. So I knew no way could IT ever get infected. I could install it as the "B:" floppy.
One of those early old-school 5 1/4" floppy drives which used a lot of discrete IC chips.
( I wanted to let malware *think* it was writing to the disk, but really all it did was position the head and beep the piezo. While a program like "KGB.exe" or similar small DOS tracing tools [textfiles.com] would be reporting what was executing at the time... )
The line he was telling me is that he was playing around with odd characters in the file name which would not display - which could have been a line of bull, knowing him.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 22 2017, @01:28PM
Well, in that case it's wrong to claim it on the design of the file system either, as those characters clearly had no place in the file names (there was a specification what characters were allowed/forbidden in file names). Possibly the OS implementation was to blame if it allowed those characters in file names against the specification; however I suspect he simply did a direct manipulation of the directory data on disk.
(Score: 1) by WillR on Wednesday November 22 2017, @01:51PM