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Re:Saudi Arabia cyber attack goal was chemical plant explosi... by salimmadjd on Thursday March 15, 2018 @11:08AM (#16593461)
There is some shoddy journalism here:

“If attackers developed a technique against Schneider equipment in Saudi Arabia, they could very well deploy the same technique here in the United States,” said James A. Lewis, a cybersecurity expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.

Yet the NY Times forgets to cite their own article that shows Unite Arab Emirates, who is politically tied to Saudi Arabia was one of the largest donors to Center for Strategic and International Studies [0] as well as CSIS own listing [1]

All of the investigators believe the attack was most likely intended to cause an explosion that would have killed people

Times does not list which investigators they have spoken to directly.

and again, which intelligence analysts?

What worries investigators and intelligence analysts

Two weeks later, the same attackers hit other Saudi targets with the same computer virus. On Jan. 23, 2017, they struck again

How did they establish it was the same attackers?

The article then talks about the Shamoon attack attributed to Iran with links and attribution to an earlier article by one of the writers and then in it says,

The attack in August was not a Shamoon attack. It was much more dangerous.

If it was not a Shamoon attack, then why mention that. Or why not just say, past attacks were attributed to Iran.

Once again, Investigators believe a nation-state was responsible because there was no obvious profit motive Times does not indicate which "investigators" believes that.

Also, it seems like more and more "journalism" is relying on "believe" rather than evidence and facts.

Then once again, Cybersecurity experts said Iran, China, Russia the United States and Israel had the technical sophistication to launch such attacks

No quote or attribution to which expert or their level of experience.

The article ends horribly with, Tasnee said in an email that it had hired experts from Symantec and IBM to study the attack against it

"Study the attack", Which means the experts have not had a chance to review the evidence nor Times had spoken directly to these hired experts to get their answers. But they wrote a whole article with their own conclusions.

[0] https://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/09/07/us/politics/foreign-po...

[1] https://www.csis.org/support-csis/our-donors/government-dono...

Re:Saudi Arabia cyber attack goal was chemical plant explosi... by uhnuhnuhn on Thursday March 15, 2018 @12:15PM (#16594122)
"Times does not list which investigators they have spoken to directly."

"Times does not indicate which "investigators" believes that."

Not disclosing your sources is journalism 101. You will have to choose to trust or mistrust the professional integrity of NYT journalists and editors. Integrity is the NYT's main selling point, so make of that what you will.

Re:Saudi Arabia cyber attack goal was chemical plant explosi... by ghostbrainalpha on Thursday March 15, 2018 @03:15PM (#16595718)
>> "hired experts from Symantec..."

Looks like they are in good hands then. The guys behind Norton Anti-virus and those excellent SSL certificates are definitely going to get to the bottom of this.