Comment on St. Paul, MN, was hacked so badly that the National Guard has been deployed
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks agobut it isn’t technically a VPN
It is. Others have given some details, but I’ll keep it simple
A VPN makes remote devices seem like they’re on the same network. You can have all traffic be routed through that virtual network, or just some of it. Common use cases:
- consumers - make yourself appear to be somewhere else; basically replaces old SOCKS proxies (all traffic routed)
- workplace - provide access to internal, protected resources to those that need them (only relevant traffic is routed)
- home lab - expose internal services publicly (reverse of workplace use case)
Those are all VPNs, though the first is acting more like a proxy than the others.
National Guard Cybersecurity team
This isn’t some crack team of experts, it’s mostly part-time soldiers who likely have a relevant day job. My brother-in-law is a mechanic at the National Guard, not because he’s an expert, but because they paid for his 4-year degree and only expect a few hours of work each month. A lot of people join for inexpensive medical insurance.
This cybersecurity team is probably just a handful of locals who work in IT locally and have had training on systems commonly used by the military.
If this was a high profile attack by a state actor or something, they wouldn’t call the National Guard, they’d call the NSA, CIA, or something similar, as in an actual crack team. The National Guard is mostly there to provide structure in emergencies, like organizing rescue efforts in a flood or help firefighters with labor in fighting wildfires. They’re just weekend warriors, not experts.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
I guess my confusion here comes from trying to reconcile the broad, colloquial understanding of a VPN, and the actual, precise, technical definition.
When a news article runs with VPN in a wide audience usage… 95% of people think SurfShark or Nord or PIA or whatever, something that is consumer oriented, that accesses the broad internet, as you give in your first example, where it basically functions as a more elaborate set of proxies than what most people could probably manage on their own.
So… yes, it technically is a type 2 VPN as you’ve listed, but it technically isn’t a type 1 VPN, which is what 95% of people think a VPN is.
I’ve worked remote for a decently long while, and most other remote workers I’ve known… they do not have really any understanding at all that their work login thing… is fundamentally the same kind of VPN as Surfshark, just configured differently.
My goal was to emphasize this difference, but yeah, I could have used better wording.
And yes, I know as well that Nat Guard CyberSec are by no means the creme de la creme of cybersec specialists, but the fact that a top level Municipal agency went ‘oh fuck’ and basically escalated the issue to the next level of IT support, the State Nat. Guard… that means they got pretty fucking spooked.
Also, the FBI is involved as well, they’d be the ones to pass it up to NSA and/or Homeland Security, I think… and the Nat Guard would be the ones capable of passing it up to… Army CyberCom… and I think if it makes it up to either Army CyberCom or the NSA or Homeland Sec, well at that point, its theoretically possible that any member of the alphabet soup could be called upon, or at the very least, have it come up on someone’s desk.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Sure. But VPNs were around long before the consumer-oriented VPNs were a thing.
Or they just had one person handling their IT and needed help, and didn’t want to pay an outside contractor.
I’m honestly surprised the National Guard was called at all. If anything, that shows how backwards Minnesota is, or at least the mayor of St. Paul. I’d expect that if my state government got hacked, they’d call in a local cyber security firm to come audit things, and we have plenty of them here (I’m in Utah, so not even a big state). This isn’t a National Guard situation, it’s an independent cyber security audit and FBI situation.
Here’s how I expect this happened:
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
No argument there, you’re right.
Nah, read the links I provided.
It went from the normal IT department, to the city level Emergency Response Team, to the Nat Guard and FBI.
Cities, larger ones anyway … often have their own sort of mini-FEMA, who have their own capacities to order around other local agencies, but also have a whole bunch of protocols for… when something exceeds the capacity of everything they can more or less order around.
I am not in particular familiar with St.Paul specifically… but …
It could overall make sense given the capacities of the city (the Twin Cities, St. Paul + Minneapolis), and them knowing their own constraints.
It could also make sense if they rather rapidly at least suspected a very sophisticated, foreign threat actor.
That second half is kinda most of my argument:
Why would you start up the Military chain of escalation unless you either suspected a potential foreign nation state actor, and/or, critical infrastructure systems were breached, so critical that they’d been previously deemed an actual national security risk, should that happen?
I am not certain of what happened, nor certain of the validity of this logic… but this is my logic, from the original comment.
Sure, they could have just panicked. I don’t know that they did or did not.
But I have worked with people who’ve been employed by, led things like FEMA and City level emergency response teams, their specialities being the cybersec/netsec variety, and… this seems like actually following a previously outlined set of steps to me.
Ahahah, two things here:
Basically, see what I just wrote above.
Really? Utah, prime recruiting ground for the CIA, Utah, with the largest NSA data center complex in the country, possibly the world, that is archiving essentially all US internal communications they can so they can search through them later if need be, Utah, with more and more corporate datacenters all the time… you don’t class Utah as a big state, in terms of the tech sector?
Perhaps I am misunderstanding you, but I just find that silly.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
In terms of military, we have:
That’s it. We have ~3.5M people (~1/100 of US population), and only ~3 metros that matter (SLC, Utah County, St. George). Minnesota has ~5.7M people, so it’s almost twice as big, and the Twin Cities cities area (includes St. Paul) is bigger than the entire population of Utah.
So while Utah punches above its weight in tech, St. Paul area absolutely dwarfs it in population. Surely they have a robust cybersecurity industry there…
The National Guard just seems like a desperate move. When they’re deployed, they take orders from the the federal military, and at peace, monitoring foreign threats seems like a federal thing. You call in the National Guard to put down a riot or something where you just need bodies, not for anything niche. The only way that makes sense is if they think there will be an invasion (angsty/Canadians?) and they need boots on the ground for physical protection. Otherwise, just call a local cybersecurity firm to trace the attack and assess damage.