If this were a couple of kids in the US... they would both be on their way to Gitmo, the anti-rejection drugs the kid probably needs to stay alive wouldn't be addressed... then the remaining kid would probably go on a hunger strike in Solitary.

Oh... and someone at the Bank would be put in charge of a new "cyber security" division, with a big bonus and a corner office.

I wish we could be more like Canada some times.

That doesn't address the issue of unintended side effects from existing bugs. I agree that a separate LAN can help mitigate things, but it doesn't eliminate the odd things that can happen in a world where code is trusted by default.

Imagine if your garage light switch would 1 out of every 1000,000 times, cause your roof to fall off your house.... this is the world of software that can do anything.

The problem IS that things are trusted by default... but not in the way the author thought. If you trust every program you run by default, you are doomed. An operating system should NEVER trust anything by default... Linux, Windows, OSX all violate this principle. So do embedded devices base on some variant of them.

Never trust by default, and you stop having to worry about side-effects, and start deciding what the limits are ahead of time.

This sounds exactly like a Fountain Code to me, which isn't exactly news.

I find it interesting that an insightful mention of some spooks gets down voted at the same time some spammer shows up and spoils the story.

When you listen to them talking politics, and then bomb the wedding down the street instead... that's US Intelligence.

Wouldn't surprise me at all

I sit here in the Cassandra suite, watching the tech community finally waking up to the reality of the world. You are starting to panic because you know none of the operating system choices you have are viable for truly secure systems. Soon you will learn about Multi-Level Secure systems, Capabilities, and other features of the secure computing..

About 10 years from now, you'll get the hints the universe has dropped on you, and start implementing these systems.

About 10 years after that, some real old timers (or young punks who've read history) will point out that this stuff was actually figured out in the late 1960s, and early 1970s.

Multi-Level Security was worked out in the late 1960s in order to allow computing both Secret and "Top Secret" information in the same computer at the same time. The use of the Bell-LaPadula model ensures that a lesser privileged user can never cause grief for a more privileged user. If we had Mutli-Level secure systems, we could safely run any program we want in a sandbox, and it could never, ever crawl back out of it.

The closest you're likely to approach is if you enable the MAC option in FreeBSD, which is experimental.

The Genode project aims to provide a capability based security system which can run Linux Apps... it is the best chance I see going forward for a truly secure system that isn't military grade. In such systems, you specify at run time exactly which files can be accessed by an application. This has the benefit of explicitly limiting the side effects of said application, and thus making for a far more secure system. You might be tempted to think this would make it unusable (as App-Armour tends to be)... but it doesn't have to be that way. In fact, it's possible to make apps behave almost identically, as far as the user is concerned, without compromising anything.

I think we're still 10 years out before people wake up and realize that our collective assumptions about computer security are wrong, and this needs a more rigorous, carefully engineered solution, instead of the layers of patch we currently employ. I'm hoping that my frequent postings on this subject are informative, and help shorten that timespan significantly.

Are any of these systems Multi-Level Secure? This stuff was figured out in the 1970s, we're still 10 years away from collectively realizing we needed it yesterday.

Amen!

I just "upgraded" some Windows 7 machines to IE8 (from IE10) because that is the standard the automobile industry has settled on.

Linux is not any more secure than Windows in the long run... its not a multi-level secure system, nor is any other choice you've ever heard of. Until we adopt something like the Bell-LaPadula security model, we're going to be chasing our collective tails, and this is going to be happening for years!

The InterNet was created because the guy in charge of things didn't want a teletype in his office for each and every machine he could access. A network to access all of them, and a single terminal made more sense.

It had NOTHING to do with nuclear war, or reliability, at first.