I was working in a manufacturing facility where I had hundreds of industrial computers and printers that were between 0 and 20 years old. They were running on their own clean network so that someone has to be in the manufacturing network to access them. The boss announced that the executives will be pushing a “zero trust” security model because they need IoT devices. I told him “A computer running Windows 98 can’t be on the same VLAN as office computers. We can’t harden most of the systems or patch the vulnerabilities. We also can’t reprogram all of the devices to communicate using TLS or encrypt communications.“ Executives got offended that I would even question the decision and be so vocal about it. They hired a team to remove the network hardware and told me that I was overreacting. All of our system support was contracted to India so I was going to be the on-site support person.

They moved all the manufacturing devices to the office network. Then the attacks started. Printers dumped thousands of pages of memes. Ransomware shut down manufacturing computers. Our central database had someone change a serial number for a product to “hello world” and that device got shipped to a customer. SharePoint was attacked in many many ways. VNC servers were running on most computers and occasionally I would see someone remotely poking around and I knew it wasn’t from our team because we were all there.

I bought a case of cheap consumer routers and used them in manufacturing cells to block port traffic. I used Kali on an old computer to scan and patch network vulnerabilities daily.

The worst part was executives didn’t “believe” that there were security incidents. You don’t believe in what you don’t understand right?

After 8 months of responding to security incident after security incident I quit to avoid burning out. This is a company that manufactures and sells devices to big companies like apple and google to install in their network. This isn’t an insignificant company. Security negligence on a level I get angry thinking about.

The world is talking about AI, self-driving cars, big data, IOT and there are roboter driving around on Mars.
And here I stand, trying to figure out why a small change in a silly batch-script works on Windows7 and raises an error on Windows XP.
In 2020.

Started the year well :D
Making an app to view our home energy usage and output (solar panels).
Raspberry pi is connected to our energy meter and is used as a server.

But some of you may not like this...
The Pi is running Windows IOT :P

I bought a corporate refurb HP desktop to use to replace a rpi3 in an IoT project I was working on. It came with Windows 10 on it. It has an ethernet port on it, which is what I prefer, but Windows 10 couldn't see it. So I installed Debian and everything worked perfectly, with no driver config.

Because I am very interested in cyber security and plan on doing my masters in it security I always try to stay up to date with the latest news and tools. However sometimes its a good idea to ask similar-minded people on how they approach these things, - and maybe I can learn a couple of things. So maybe people like @linuxxx have some advice :D Let's discuss :D

1) What's your goto OS? I currently use Antergos x64 and a Win10 Dualboot. Most likely you guys will recommend Linux, but if so what ditro, and why? I know that people like Snowden use QubesOS. What makes it much better then other distro? Would you use it for everyday tasks or is it overkill? What about Kali or Parrot-OS?

2) Your go-to privacy/security tools? Personally, I am always conencted to a VPN with openvpn (Killswitch on). In my browser (Firefox) I use UBlock and HttpsEverywhere. Used NoScript for a while but had more trouble then actual use with it (blocked too much). Search engine is DDG. All of my data is stored in VeraCrypt containers, so even if the system is compromised nobody is able to access any private data. Passwords are stored in KeePass. What other tools would you recommend?

3) What websites are you browsing for competent news reports in the it security scene? What websites can you recommend to find academic writeups/white papers about certain topics?

4) Google. Yeah a hate-love relationship, but its hard to completely avoid it. I do actually have a Google-Home device (dont kill me), which I use for calender entries, timers, alarms, reminders, and weather updates as well as IOT stuff such as turning my LED lights on and off. I wouldn"t mind switching to an open source solution which is equally good, however so far I couldnt find anything that would a good option. Suggestions?

5) What actions do you take to secure your phone and prevent things such as being tracked/spyed? Personally so far I havent really done much except for installing AdAway on my rooted device aswell as the same Firefox plugins I use on my desktop PC.

6) Are there ways to create mirror images of my entire linux system? Every now and then stuff breaks, that is tedious to fix and reinstalling the system takes a couple of hours. I remember from Windows that software such as Acronis or Paragon can create a full image of your system that you can backup and restore at any point to get a stable, healthy system back (without the need to install everything by hand).

7) Would you encrypt the boot partition of your system, even tho all data is already stored in encrypted containers?

8) Any other advice you can give :P ?

Anyone else feels technology didn't have a major turning point in a while?

I mean, since the late 1980's we had an explosion of technologies:

Gaming consoles
Macintosh
Windows
GNU/Linux
World Wide Web
Smartphones
The rise of advanced web applications and JavaScript

But now? It seems like stagnation for the past 5-10 years or so.
Sure here and there there some nice stuff(like Cryptocurrency, Cloud services, IoT), but nothing that feels completely game-changing.

What do you think will be the next thing that will completely change our lives?

!(dev|rant)

I just got an old refurb for the garage to run my camera capture stuff, as the raspberry pi wasn't cutting it. I thought for a split second about leaving the legit version of Windows 10 that came with it on it, and trying to do some in-home streaming over steam, but I found out very quickly that an old corporate refurb is not going to cut it for game streaming. And with all the complete nonsense you have to abide to make Windows usable(ie: disabling stuff you don't want), it's not going to be any use to me in Windows if it can't stream.

Also, for some reason, Windows just wouldn't use the built-in NIC at all. It reported the cable was unplugged, and just absolutely would not work. So, Debian it is, and lo and behold! The NIC works like a champ now. The camera capture works brilliantly too, so now I can turn off my desktop at night.

Linux just works. Windows, more and more all the time, is just more trouble than it's worth.

I am the only engineer in my company, we develop and sell software solutions to a niece market.
In 1 year and a half i developed software for Android, IOS, Windows Desktop, web applications and an IoT solution........... My code has not a single line of comment....