It breaks the HN guidelines to do this in comments here, so please don't.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Will modify future behaviour :)

No, there were days when people did not even lock their cars and their houses (but maybe you are too young to have known that time where you live) because it was not expected that anyone would actually rob anything. Especially in communities where everyone knew everyone else. And if a robbery happened, the blame would still have been put on the thief, not the owner.

Such situation rely on mutual trust, and only work on small scales (village, loose neighborhood). On the Internet, there are billions of people that live close by.

I think the main discrepancy is that people really do not understand either that the Internet connect them to everyone or how vast the world really is.

These are still are such days. There still are thousands of communities, even in California, where you can get away with this. The difference is not time but population density. There was probably never a time when you could leave your home unlocked and unguarded in urban cities.

There was and not so long ago (e.g. 40 years ago in Portugal or Poland. Probably many other countries). So I would change your statement:

The difference is not time but population density and specially politics/religion.

The burden and responsibility to protect my home is mine. This isn't an either/or as to who to blame, it's a both/and. So back to the link. If you have a high-value service like an electrical grid, or dam, or nuclear plant that is open to the Internet (the most crime-ridden neighbourhood on the planet), do you really honesty think the media's typical response of "hackers broke in to..." is the correct narrative?

Of course it isn't, but when did media stop at that ? Link baits and ad revenue are more tempting then integrity.

Freedom of press, monetization and responsibility - pick two.

If you go read Tektronix's instructions - their screenshots show "no authentication" selected.

This itself isn't really an issue, since the networks that we're connecting these to are isolated, inbound-only lab networks. We know that. Our lab admins know that. The network security guys know that. There are exceptions filed for the IPs of these devices.

However, if someone ever -changed- that network configuration and opened it up to the rest of the corporate network (or for some terrible reason, the internet), those scopes would be just as ripe for takedown as the stuff shown in TFA.

It just takes that small network change to enable something -else- to access the WWW (code download for security updates, anyone?) that exposes our other items on the network. In fact, I can think of several reasons why someone might expose a VNC:

1. Actual remote control -within- a facility, but probably in the deployment guide says "use a secure network"

2. Someone wrote a cool Web GUI to "modernize" something, and used VNC (undocumented and poorly-configured) to pull off what they pulled off

3. Someone exposed a subnet to the internet to enable remote access for something -else- which was probably properly-secured, but happened to -also- expose the thing hosting the VNC server.

[1] http://www.tek.com/support/faqs/how-do-you-set-vnc-dpo7000-d...

Meanwhile, in my tiny town in the States bike theft was basically the single most common form of crime, and I know of one house I would walk by every week that would openly have as many as half-a-dozen stolen bikes displayed for sale in their front yard.

[0] http://www.helsinkitimes.fi/finland/finland-news/domestic/10...

A few years ago I watched a junky go from bike to bike in a bike rack testing each lock to see if it would open easily. Right in plain view of everybody. When I confronted him he launched into some long and carefully rehearsed sob story about how his friend told him to come and get his bike but didn't know which one it was.

I don't think that it's population density as much as the shared culture of the place you live. I would have totally blamed myself if my bike wasn't there today, and I think it would be stupid to blame anyone else.

"Hi everyone, my bike is stolen last week. If you see it anywhere please text me! Thanks !"

That must have been an extremely long time ago: http://www.ancientresource.com/lots/roman/romankeys_locks.ht...

Well of course you don't; the robbers die while still crossing the perilous deserts and/or trying to avoid lethal wildlife.

Nope. I can tell there are still people alive these days who remember that this was still the case in most places of Western Europe.

when you have nothing worth stealing, it is not worth investing in security

From the attacker's perspective something like a connected smart TV has extremely high value as a mechanism for further penetrating a network. Black boxes that no one can login to under normal circumstances are the perfect secret strongholds to maintain a persistent presence on any given network.

Now comes the Internet. It's a huge giga-city. Expect robbery, larceny, hacking, and more.

FWIW, crime rates have been monotonically decreasing for a long time.

Nope. This would never work. People don't understand how much of it works. Taking a day out of the year to explain / re-explain isn't going to do a single thing. Instead you need to make computer classes mandatory in K-12 and get people educated on how they work so they can understand the issues.

Take a topic you know absolutely nothing about. Let's say it's aerospace. Now every year we have an aerospace day to try and explain to you how various types of fan and jet engines work. You certainly wouldn't expect everyone to be able to handle fixing one after that one day, do you? Same with internet security.

> owner left the front door unlocked, people would rightfully put the onus mostly on the store owner.

So just because the store owner does something stupid you think most people would consider it his fault? That's...that's horrible. Yeah he possibly could have prevented it (though you don't actually know that as they could have broken in anyway; people don't just go up to stores at night to randomly test doors then go home).

I once had a lad declare that GitHub was stupid, because it locked out our IP for 5 minutes after the class tried to login to their accounts with at least half of them forgetting the strong passwords I insisted they use.

I watched a girl log into her vps by running her finger across the top row of her keyboard. When I insisted she change her password, she ran her finger across the keyboard in the opposite direction.

Many people know and understand basic security, they just don't care. They think they have nothing of worth losing, and so don't need to be secure. Even after I explained to the student that their vps could be used to mine bitcoin, fetch pornographic material or send out phishing emails, their attitude was very much - meh!

I'm all for educating people on these issues, but the true way to protect them from their own stupidity is to ensure that it is impossible for them to start up a vnc server without enforcing a strong password. Security by design will be even more important as iot becomes more prevalent.

tl;dr - You can't rely on users to protect themselves.

What is a 'strong password'? Minimum 12 characters, 2 symbols, 2 caps, 2 lower case? "1!qQaAzX2@wWsSxX" fits (and exceeds) those requirements.

Trying to enforce strong passwords doesn't work; people just make up new insecure passwords.

User-hurting policies like "Thou shalt have at least 2 symbols in thine password" are partly to blame.

And it's hard to enforce people not using phrases.

People don't interact with jet engines, but they do interact with planes. And they're lectured about airplane safty evey single time they get in a plane. So this might actually be an argument in favor of educating people about internet security.

Bottom line: please don't overuse analogies. They don't prove anything.

Edit: simplify

Actually, I'd expect a lot of increase in awareness of what the relevant issues are. No, I wouldn't expect someone exposed to aerospace day to be able to fix a jet engine. But they're much more likely to know what problems commonly occur and who can fix them.

The owner of the car can blame himself for forgeting to lock the car, the insurance won't blame anyone but won't pay for reparation, the justice system puts the blame on the thief but would not do much about it if it's petty.

And of course if it was a bank leaving bags of notes on an unlocked cabinet in the entrance, people would go bat-shit about irresponsible behavior on the banks side.

I feel that's how it would go for the online world as well.

When I get robbed: the robber hurt me, and I failed to protect myself. Failing to protect myself is not a social problem.

When my bank gets robbed: the robber hurt me and the bank, and the bank failed to protect me. The robber is at fault, and the bank is at fault for breaking it's promise to me. That's a social problem.

Security is hard. Blaming the victim of a hack is pointless because usually you have no idea whether they did something wrong or if they were the target of a particularly clever attacker.

In the case of these large corps being hacked, they are 100% responsible, and most of them we do know how they got hacked; its usually through very humdrum (if organized) means.

1. You drive to a random address(es), accessible from the public premises (IP). 2. You knock on the door (TCP SYN). 3. Someone comes and opens it for you (TCP SYN+ACK). 4. You ask what's here (VNC handshake). 5. You're told it's a power plant or doctor's office or whatever (VNC frame data). 6. Sometimes the replies aren't fun, sometimes it's really weird - some pal seems to be willing to control a nuclear reactor for you, no questions asked. 7. You blog about your experience, including a conversation transcript.

It could be wrong to publicly announce (step 7) that there's a weird person in there (with full address details) that can do anything for you, as this can put others in danger. It's ethically unclear: it requires a human review and judgment (a robot can't tell if it's weird, so if data collection is fully automatic and unsupervised it becomes complicated), and even for humans it's probably not completely wrong to disclose, if done responsibly.

But just driving by and knocking on the random doors asking what's there - it would be really weird to me if we'd say this is anything wrong with this.

I think that unless you want to start conversation about what "blame" is, it's safer to use words describing strict logical causation instead. Unlike "blame", causation is objective and doesn't depend on morality.

Most home burglaries involve breaking a window or kicking in a door, which is why people say "locks just keep an honest man honest".

I can't remember what it's called but my insurance polcy has a clause that I have to do what a "reasonable" person would do to secure my belongings.

Edit: After some additional research, people on message boards pointed out that many home invasions are done with lock-pick kits, or the burglar breaks a window and unlocks the door. Homes are often broken into without any damage to the lock or door, so the insurance company would never even know if you locked the door or not. It just doesn't come up in the investigation.

I also never leave my house unlocked, even when I'm inside.

Makes sense. I will conduct myself differently in the future. Cheers :)