Since Friday's Iranian dustup, which snuffed Suliemani, the newsies have been warning of cyber counter attacks from Iran. If that happens, and if they put anything important down, we have a vast surplus of lawyers sloshing around the country looking for something to do. We should sic 'em on the companies careless enough to fall to cyber attack.
There is no excuse for a company to fall victim to a cyber attack. Straight forward simple procedures will keep Iranian hackers from putting out the lights in the US. Some rules follow
1. Never use the public internet, or the public phone system to remote control or monitor anything. If you just have to have remote control, string your own fiber optics. In most cases this is the power company, which owns their own poles and has their own line crews to string new fiber optic cable. This way you have to climb a pole and splice in an optical signal splitter to tap into the control signals. Hackers don't climb poles. If they cannot get to the target over the public internet, sitting comfortably in their offices, they don't go there.
2. Don't run Windows for anything important. Go with Apple or Linux or anything other than Windows. Windows is like Swiss cheese, holes every where. Windows does autorun, any media (floppy disc, CD, DVD, flashdrive) plugged into a Windows computer is checked for music and code. Music gets played. code gets run. Malicious code gets loaded onto disk and run. That's how we spread the Stuxnet virus onto Iranian computers controlling centrifugal uranium isotope separators. Stuxnet ordered the centrifugal separators to run full speed until they self destructed. We put the Stuxnet code onto flashdrives and scattered the flashdrives over Iranian parking lots. Sharp eye Iranian workers spotted them on the way into work, picked them up, took them into work, and plugged them into work computers. The centrifugal isotope separators started blowing up shortly there after.
Should Iranian hackers knock out anything we care about, we should sic our vast surplus of lawyers on the stupid company. They ought to be able to sue them, and get convictions for pure stupidity. The thought of an army of hungry lawyers suing them down to their socks ought to stimulate even Dilbert's pointy haired boss into action.
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