Debate Candidates: ‘Cyber’ Security.
Trump thinks he knows hackers, “[cyber hackers are] somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds.” So stupidly stereotypical. If I chose to put on my makeup, he would fall all over himself to get a look at me, because of his incredible self-control. But it doesn’t matter if I weigh 10,000 pounds: I have the skills and that’s where I count. #ImWithRosie (she has skills too.)
“Cyber warfare is one of the big challenges facing the next president. The security aspect of cyber is very, very tough. And maybe it’s hardly doable.” That’s what the candidate-borg said, and many people agree. It doesn’t matter, there’s one thing we need to do for security:
Stop Doing Stupid Shit.
If you don’t know anything about computers, choose a better password. If you can, train other users to choose a better password.
If you are a programmer, no plaintext passwords. Only idiots do that, but the web was built on by idiots. Encrypt them.
If you’re a programmer, don’t upload your keys to github. These things happen to people who don’t care about security, who don’t think about security.
If you’re a sysadmin, don’t leave your telnet port open. This problem was solved decades ago, but it’s still here.
Train your users to not open suspicious attachments, to not look at attachments in spam email. To never click a link sent from someone they don’t know. These sorts of things would stop 90% of hackers.
Most hackers come through the most obvious doors. All these problems can be solved, but companies don’t, because they don’t care. Companies need to be sued, then they will start caring.
Transcript
For full information, here is the transcript of what one candidate said about ‘cyber’:
I think cyber security, cyber warfare will be one of the biggest challenges facing the next president, because clearly we’re facing at this point two different kinds of adversaries. There are the independent hacking groups that do it mostly for commercial reasons to try to steal information that they can use to make money.
But increasingly, we are seeing cyber attacks coming from states, organs of states. The most recent and troubling of these has been Russia. There’s no doubt now that Russia has used cyber attacks against all kinds of organizations in our country, and I am deeply concerned about this. I know Donald’s very praiseworthy of Vladimir Putin, but Putin is playing a really…
(CROSSTALK)
CLINTON: … tough, long game here. And one of the things he’s done is to let loose cyber attackers to hack into government files, to hack into personal files, hack into the Democratic National Committee. And we recently have learned that, you know, that this is one of their preferred methods of trying to wreak havoc and collect information. We need to make it very clear — whether it’s Russia, China, Iran or anybody else — the United States has much greater capacity. And we are not going to sit idly by and permit state actors to go after our information, our private-sector information or our public-sector information.
And we’re going to have to make it clear that we don’t want to use the kinds of tools that we have. We don’t want to engage in a different kind of warfare. But we will defend the citizens of this country.
And the Russians need to understand that. I think they’ve been treating it as almost a probing, how far would we go, how much would we do. And that’s why I was so — I was so shocked when Donald publicly invited Putin to hack into Americans. That is just unacceptable. It’s one of the reasons why 50 national security officials who served in Republican information — in administrations…
HOLT: Your two minutes have expired.
CLINTON: … have said that Donald is unfit to be the commander- in-chief. It’s comments like that that really worry people who understand the threats that we face.
Transcript 2
Here is what the other candidate said:
As far as the cyber, I agree to parts of what Secretary Clinton said. We should be better than anybody else, and perhaps we’re not. I don’t think anybody knows it was Russia that broke into the DNC. She’s saying Russia, Russia, Russia, but I don’t — maybe it was. I mean, it could be Russia, but it could also be China. It could also be lots of other people. It also could be somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds, OK?
TRUMP: You don’t know who broke in to DNC.
But what did we learn with DNC? We learned that Bernie Sanders was taken advantage of by your people, by Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Look what happened to her. But Bernie Sanders was taken advantage of. That’s what we learned.
Now, whether that was Russia, whether that was China, whether it was another country, we don’t know, because the truth is, under President Obama we’ve lost control of things that we used to have control over.
We came in with the Internet, we came up with the Internet, and I think Secretary Clinton and myself would agree very much, when you look at what ISIS is doing with the Internet, they’re beating us at our own game. ISIS.
So we have to get very, very tough on cyber and cyber warfare. It is — it is a huge problem. I have a son. He’s 10 years old. He has computers. He is so good with these computers, it’s unbelievable. The security aspect of cyber is very, very tough. And maybe it’s hardly doable.
But I will say, we are not doing the job we should be doing. But that’s true throughout our whole governmental society. We have so many things that we have to do better, Lester, and certainly cyber is one of them.
