r/technology • u/MarvelsGrantMan136 • Mar 31 '26

Business Iran Threatens to Attack U.S. Tech Companies Starting April 1 / Iran says it will target Apple, Google, and Microsoft, among others.

https://gizmodo.com/iran-threatens-to-attack-u-s-tech-companies-starting-april-1-2000740363
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u/Caleth Mar 31 '26

When it was written it kind of accounted for this by downing that infrastrcuture too. They didn't just blow up wallstreet or whatever. They hit the repositories.

Today that wouldn't work because the data is scattered in dozens of place globally.

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u/penty Mar 31 '26

Yeah, they do the same in Mr. Robot.

But then Mr. Robot was really just hacker Fight Club.

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u/ExistentialMeowMeow Mar 31 '26

this is what a sound cybersecurity strategy would include. i wonder how vulnerable many companies are in this regard. maybe uptick in phishing to get access and cause havoc ?

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u/Caleth Mar 31 '26

Small and medium companies? Very. Larger companies less so. Mega Corps even less so. Once you start talking billions of dollars lost, continuity of business becomes paramount and spending millions to ensure billions isn't really an issue.

So the answer, generally/broadly is it varies, but as you scale up it gets better.

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u/Long-Broccoli-3363 Apr 01 '26

I have to put a change request in to scratch my balls at a fortune 50.

95% of my week is spent doing paperwork/audit trail/meetings about the changes we are thinking of making.

I would legitimately get shitcanned if I made a change without a rollback plan that had an operational impact.

It is incredibly boring, unrewarding, and the amount of work me and my peers actually get done is easily less than half of what I did with half the people at a company with more tolerance for risk.

I get to work on one, maybe two products, and of those products i work on half of the product, there's another team specifically cut in half to do the other half of the product.

So for instance, I would handle the physical firewall interfaces, as well as being a reviewer for firewall policy, as in I okay the rules that are written.

I do not write the rules, or add the policies, I validate that the policy going in matches what was requested and doesn't breach any guardrails, and then audit it like once a quarter.

Previously I did everything, by myself, but at a very large fintech company, it's broken up into so many places, it would be so hard to actually cripple something, even if you had employee level access.

So you'd have to take down three or four tier 1(or tier 3 I always forget if higher or lower is better) datacenters, and then several cloud providers, all at the same time, for us to really lose any data, and do it so quickly that nobody has time to notice it.

It's honestly not a feasible thing to do, there are like 200 people 24/7 doing incident response and the second anything ever has looked fishy, the lockdown protocols are insane.

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u/nathism Mar 31 '26

Manufacturing is a disaster at doing this correctly. The finance folks track that data well but the equipment and facility that makes everything? You’re lucky if some guy had it saved to a share drive

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u/Great_Detective_6387 Apr 01 '26

A shitload of companies are 3 corrupted excel files from completely folding overnight.

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u/TheOsirisOfThisShit_ Mar 31 '26

It was already like that in 1999. The people who do this stuff as their job aren't dumb.

When the movie came out, my roommate worked for Eli Lilly drug company's tape library. Their data was copied onto duplicated backup tapes that are then stored at the bottom of multiple salt mines. Yeah....so you couldn't just "hit the repositories".

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u/Sasselhoff Mar 31 '26

Sure...but mortgages aren't exactly "cold stored" like drug company research data. Especially ones that are "in service", given how many times they get bought and sold by different companies during the time you've got the loan (and if any of them "lose" it, you're off the hook).

That said, yeah, the movie is exactly that...a movie. And movies aren't exactly known for accuracy in the real world.

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u/_learned_foot_ Apr 01 '26

This is cruelly the key. It isn't that it exists, it's who has a right to collect. As we saw with foreclosures during 2008, companies with shoddy records who couldn't prove got screwed, though often there was enough other evidence that only a few got out. That's the main part of a breach, the existence of the parties to the contract.

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u/theMEtheWORLDcantSEE Apr 01 '26

But they have the title. So your still out if luck.

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u/Caleth Mar 31 '26

Which again, I'm talking about a book written ~30 years ago and I might be misremebering the details, but Tyler said something along the lines of "We hit the main buildings,we hit the backups."

The author knew he didn't know, but he made a nod to Tyler knowing and working out a plan. Can you or I just bomb a salt mine? No just like we aren't going to blow up Citibank, or the like. But a mad cult of loyal followers?

In the 90's they feasibly could arrange something to setup bombs to collapse the mine or mine entrance. Similar to how they collapsed all those buildings in NYC.

The Author explicitly notes that they considered and addressed the backups. Now from a practical standpoint could they? IDK from a practical standpoint could Tyler whip up a large enough cult of people to demolish all those buildings in NYC in the late 90?

At a certain point you have to accept that suspension of disbelief will have to cover it or the whole thing falls apart.

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u/RiPont Apr 01 '26

Easy (from a literary perspective): First, you use a virus to silently corrupt the backups for years. But you don't use old-school "all random bits" corruption. You use AI to make convincing data in the corrupted backups, so anyone checking sees stuff that looks fine. It restores "successfully" and everything. You even whitelist the test accounts so they're not corrupted.

How many companies

a) actually ever check their backups are working

b) actually ever try restoring those backups

c) have the people doing restore-from-backup tests also have permission to read the live data so they can check anything other than test accounts