Germany, seeking independence from U.S., pushes cyber security research

Re:Germany, seeking independence from U.S., pushes cyber sec... by jolmg on Wednesday August 29, 2018 @10:06PM (#17873638)

If national critical systems are running Windows or other US closed source tech, then technically yes. The US is potentially in control of these systems. This is true in Germany and in many (most?) other parts of the world. From the viewpoint of these nations, all the US needs to do is have Microsoft, Google, or whatever tech company is in control of a system of interest to insert malware or give the US government the private data it requests. I'm not saying it happens, but rather that it's certainly possible and completely in the US's playcourt to decide to control or not to control. This is why government computer systems should be open source or self-developed.

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Re:Germany, seeking independence from U.S., pushes cyber sec... by IanSanders on Thursday August 30, 2018 @04:24AM (#17874963)

>all the US needs to do is have Microsoft, Google, or whatever tech company is in control of a system of interest to insert malware or give the US government the private data it requests

Don't even need that. Just utilize one of the numerous vulnerabilities before it's patched.

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Re:Germany, seeking independence from U.S., pushes cyber sec... by c2k18 on Thursday August 30, 2018 @12:37AM (#17874116)

Good point I forgot to mention.

Microsoft Windows‘ unstoppable telemetry is another really important note!

Also somehow every experiment that tries to free us from this spyware (e.g. Munich Officials tried to use Linux) gets overpowered with someone throwing money at politicians who immediately change back everything to Windows...

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Re:Germany, seeking independence from U.S., pushes cyber sec... by mc32 on Wednesday August 29, 2018 @11:02PM (#17873822)

>If national critical systems are running Windows or other US closed source tech, then technically yes. The US is potentially in control of these systems.

What? So because US govt't systems run (or ran) Kaspersky (or TrendMicro) that means the US is (was) controlled, technically by Russia or Japan? Huh!

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Re:Germany, seeking independence from U.S., pushes cyber sec... by jolmg on Thursday August 30, 2018 @11:28AM (#17877499)

I don't know those software or how widely utilized they are in the US and specifically in US national security critical systems.

The US in a unique position, though. Windows and OSX are operating systems; they have complete control of everything else running in the systems they run on. Google has view of the world's web navigation, email authentication, as well as complete control over a grand portion of the world's phones (most of the other portion is controlled by Apple, also a US company), including knowledge of phone calls made between people, and their location at all times. Facebook also has great knowledge of how all people are interrelated.

There's probably lots I'm missing, but the point is that most of the world's cyberspace (a useful word apparently) is controlled by the US. If we translate that to cyberwarfare, that means that the US practically has ALL the guns. A couple guns from other nations are not going to make a difference in this space.

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Re:Germany, seeking independence from U.S., pushes cyber sec... by mc32 on Thursday August 30, 2018 @11:35AM (#17877560)

At least Kaspersky was well deployed within DHS and DoD: a ban was set to prevent new deployments: http://www.executivegov.com/2018/06/dod-nasa-gsa-issue-inter...

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Re:Germany, seeking independence from U.S., pushes cyber sec... by rurban on Thursday August 30, 2018 @06:20PM (#17881311)

The problem is not the OS, the problem are the now the backdoors in the CPU's. In all of them. With them you get even into a foreign OS, like L3 or OpenBSD.

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