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A comment on The US nuclear forces’ messaging system finally got rid of its floppy disks. Parent comment

Re:The US nuclear forces’ messaging system finally got rid o... by willis936 on Thursday October 17, 2019 @11:53PM (#21288512)
Old school tech is ridiculously easy to hack. New tech is much more hardened. The only advantage old tech has is that it doesn’t have peripherals that connect to the internet. At the end of the day the most secure computer is a new one, that isn’t on the internet, and is physically secure.
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Re:The US nuclear forces’ messaging system finally got rid o... by aussieguy1234 on Friday October 18, 2019 @12:47AM (#21288765)
Unless its been tampered with in the factory or in transit for delivery, the NSA has been known to modify hardware in transit for spying purposes.
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Re:The US nuclear forces’ messaging system finally got rid o... by willis936 on Friday October 18, 2019 @07:03AM (#21290287)
So its either have an old system that is trivially compromised or have a new system that has the potential of having an unknown backdoor.
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Re:The US nuclear forces’ messaging system finally got rid o... by onlingyding on Friday October 18, 2019 @03:56AM (#21289467)
Old computers don't have whole computers built into the motherboards running inaccessible operating systems that can't be switched off.
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Re:The US nuclear forces’ messaging system finally got rid o... by namibj on Friday October 18, 2019 @07:19AM (#21290345)
POWER9 doesn't either. I'd buy a laptop with that for 3~4k next summer if it existed...
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Re:The US nuclear forces’ messaging system finally got rid o... by pimmen on Friday October 18, 2019 @12:34AM (#21288713)
Only for people who know what they’re doing. If a hacker faces hardware they’ve never seen before it will take some time to read up on it, especially if datasheets and such is not available online.

I fully concede it’s security by obscurity, though. A technician possessing any experience with that hardware is probably going to make short work of its security measures.

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