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Foreign hackers breached a US nuclear weapons plant via SharePoint flaws

(www.csoonline.com)
433 points zdw | 3 comments | 21 Oct 25 15:51 UTC | HN request time: 0.755s | source
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stackskipton ◴[21 Oct 25 19:17 UTC] No.45660335[source]▶
As usual with all these types of posts, people go "HA HA, MICRO$OFT SUCKS" without understanding business practices that keep them afloat.

Don't use Exchange? Cool, what should we use instead? Does it support 15 people all the way up to 150000 people? I used to run Exchange cluster for 70k people, is there other mail software out there complete with non-shared disk redundancy? Where the users connect to single endpoint and software figures it out from there?

Sharepoint with another 2 RCEs. Not shocked, the software is terrible. However, it's only software that will stand up under load and let us shard it easily. All open-source software is one of those, runs fine in Homelab, likely falls down under load. Few Open Source Developers want to work on this stuff which I get because it's tedious work interfacing with computer illiterate end users. I'd rather chug sewage then do this work for free.

Finally, it's somewhat backwards compatible. Most businesses are filled with ancient software that no one has worked on in 20 years. That Excel document with Macros from 1997. With some registry changes degrading security posture, still works. I doubt you will find Office software with level of backwards compatibility unless they are using Microsoft Office level of compatibility.

Microsoft has real gordian knot here and few solutions besides "Backwards compatibility is OVER. Upgrade to modern or GTFO". Meanwhile, I get hit up by $ThreeJobsAgo over some Exchange Web Services solution I slapped together for them in Python they wanted me to upgrade to GraphAPI since Microsoft turned off Exchange Web Services in Office365.

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BeetleB ◴[21 Oct 25 19:35 UTC] No.45660597[source]▶
How oh how did these nuclear weapons facilities manage to function in the days before Exchange and Sharepoint?
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stackskipton ◴[21 Oct 25 19:53 UTC] No.45660834[source]▶
Just like everyone else before invention of Email and Document sharing? However, like every other business, no one is willing to slow down velocity for security reasons so now we are here. Unless you have a fix for "Line must go up", market pressures will always cause this.
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1. awesome_dude ◴[21 Oct 25 20:00 UTC] No.45660929[source]▶
Um, email was invented, like in the last millenium, well before Microsoft was a thing (only slightly sarky)
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2. dlgeek ◴[21 Oct 25 20:30 UTC] No.45661282[source]▶
Microsoft was a thing before email.

Microsoft was founded in 1975. The standard for SMTP wasn't published in 1981. Most early predecessors were the late 70s.

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3. awesome_dude ◴[21 Oct 25 22:59 UTC] No.45662811[source]▶
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_email

In 1971 Ray Tomlinson sent the first mail message between two computers on the ARPANET, introducing the now-familiar address syntax with the '@' symbol designating the user's system address.[2][3][4][5] Over a series of RFCs, conventions were refined for sending mail messages over the File Transfer Protocol. Several other email networks developed in the 1970s and expanded subsequently.

Proprietary electronic mail systems began to emerge in the 1970s and early 1980s. IBM developed a primitive in-house solution for office automation over the period 1970–1972, and replaced it with OFS (Office System), providing mail transfer between individuals, in 1974.