News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
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Re:Winnti: Hackers attacking the heart of German industry by arrrg on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @06:55AM (#20513892)
What are your specific criticisms? A blanket dismissal is not very helpful and additionally sort of off-topic.

For what it’s worth I found the presentation to be excellent. Extremely well readable, clear focus on text presentation and typography, tasteful illustrations that stay back and give the text the center stage but are still for the most part helpful, extremely well done and tasteful animations. (I read this on my phone so I don’t know how this looks on a wider viewport.)

Re:Winnti: Hackers attacking the heart of German industry by jamesmadison66 on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @09:30AM (#20515035)
that was my take, major props to a public news type of company for working to explain the tech details (I think, not German)
Re:Winnti: Hackers attacking the heart of German industry by akuji1993 on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @06:54AM (#20513890)
Not really sure what is so obnoxious about this. The whole article is made up like the NYTimes interactive articles are. Quite a high design standard to compare to and they're doing pretty well. No idea what you are talking about.
Re:Winnti: Hackers attacking the heart of German industry by bflesch on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @07:24AM (#20514033)
Problem is that you are forced to pay three times the price of Spotify/Netflix per month for this stuff in Germany, as this website (and many others) is financed by a mandatory fee.
Re:Winnti: Hackers attacking the heart of German industry by Bouncingsoul1 on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @07:38AM (#20514110)
Exaggerated,it is not "three times" , if you combine Spotify/Netflix you could say "you pay the same per month as for Spotify+Netflix combined (around 17€)", If you compare it to Netflix or Spotify the ratio would be 1:1.5/7. As it is payed per household the ratio is even lower if you have a family. I'm not a big fan of this mandatory fee either but we should stay a the facts.
Re:Winnti: Hackers attacking the heart of German industry by mschuster91 on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @07:46AM (#20514183)
So what? With 210€ a year it's not much more expensive than the 162€ in UK, for example. At least they're politically neutral and stick to facts and solid journalistic work, compared to private TV stations or the Axel Springer Verlag...
Re:Winnti: Hackers attacking the heart of German industry by ChuckNorris89 on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @10:29AM (#20515622)
Except the BBC produces much more high quality content, consumed worldwide(former Top Gear) on a smaller budget than Germany which has little to show for in quality content of international or even national succes.
Re:Winnti: Hackers attacking the heart of German industry by mschuster91 on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @03:44PM (#20518924)
UK content is simply consumed worldwide because it's english. German is only spoken in three countries - Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Everything produced here must be synchronized or subbed making exports expensive, in addition to Germans not liking risky experiments very much which means there is less interest.
Re:Winnti: Hackers attacking the heart of German industry by vanilla-almond on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @04:03PM (#20519085)
Although the BBC produces a lot of rubbish, it also produces high quality drama, comedies and documentaries. People watch these not simply because they are in English.

People will watch quality programming regardless of the language. Just witness the popularity of Scandinavian dramas that have won audiences across the world. Although Germany dubs foreign-language programmes (badly), lots of other countries are happy to watch with subtitles.

Re:Winnti: Hackers attacking the heart of German industry by sparkling on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @07:20AM (#20514013)
> The whole article is made up like the NYTimes interactive articles are.

Not him, but for me: yes and thats the problem.

I don't need Infotainment wrapped, information wrapped in some storytelling timeline with broken scrolling. Just give me a well done article without the nonsense, Jesus. These animation, hex code dumps etc. add ZERO value to the article.

Re:Winnti: Hackers attacking the heart of German industry by hakantan on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @08:00AM (#20514267)
Hi. One of the author(s) of the article here. The plain article with information-only is over here: https://www.tagesschau.de/investigativ/ndr/winnti-101.html

We released a longer version, because we do hear very often that people don't understand how these intrusions are actually working. Also, we tried to show the scale.

-> both long form and shorter version

hope that helps.

Re:Winnti: Hackers attacking the heart of German industry by yorwba on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @08:29AM (#20514492)
Who was the target audience for the long-form article? It has some technical details, but they appear to be used more for decorative effect. E.g. the string daa0 c7cb f4f0 fbcf d6d1 from the hexdump is eventually revealed to correspond to C:\Windows, but isn't actually explained. I was able to come up with the following Python for the obfuscation: [hex((i + 153) ^ ord(c)) for i, c in enumerate(r'C:\Windows')] but most of your readers probably just see a jumble of letters and numbers they're told has some significance, but which appears incomprehensible to them.

Did you do testing with focus groups to determine whether the longer article helped people "understand how these intrusions are actually working" or whether it just made readers aware that they don't understand?

Re:Winnti: Hackers attacking the heart of German industry by hakantan on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @08:45AM (#20514636)
This is a very good question. By now, there is a git repo (https://github.com/br-data/2019-winnti-analyse) for the more technical folks (includes yara, some scripts etc.)

We don't have focus groups, but we want to convey to our readers are certain understanding how these operations work. What threat hunting is, why it is important and all that.

At some point you have to make some certain decisions. One was not to explain what a rolling xor is. So yeah, we had to simplify a lot. The truth is, though, this stuff is hard for most people, myself included.

Hope that helps.

Re:Winnti: Hackers attacking the heart of German industry by yorwba on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @10:13AM (#20515473)
I didn't expect you to deliver a crash course that would allow even non-technical readers to understand all details, so I realize that you had to leave out a lot. That puts you in an awkward spot where your explanation probably creates more new questions than it answers.

Some news websites hesitate to put external links in their articles because they lead readers off the site, but I think they can be helpful to provide jumping-off points for the interested reader. For example, the git repository could be linked somewhere in the article, or as part of the "about the project" section at the end.

PS: The top-level comment of this thread was flagged and hidden, so most users won't see your replies here. You might want to post another top-level comment with the additional information you provided here, or maybe ask the mods via [email protected] to make your replies visible.

Re:Winnti: Hackers attacking the heart of German industry by akuji1993 on Thursday July 25, 2019 @02:59AM (#20523269)
> Some news websites hesitate to put external links in their articles because they lead readers off the site

For me, this is almost always a sign, that they don't think that high about their own content. If your content is great and you write engaging articles that are interesting to the reader, he will return. Trying to stop the reader from leaving, in a browser tab he can close at any time, is kind of ridiculous to me..

Re:Winnti: Hackers attacking the heart of German industry by jamesmadison66 on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @09:31AM (#20515052)
the graphics are a great addition. Seems like this is targeted towards a non-technical audience, but finally making an effort to explain what's going on technically like other STEM articles from do from generic news sources. Nice job if you're an author
Re:Winnti: Hackers attacking the heart of German industry by mschuster91 on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @07:44AM (#20514163)
Us techies are not the target group for such articles, they're made for the "normal" population.