I guess I'm a bit surprised some of them fell for this. That's a pretty typical/textbook/well-known attack vector. Given that they're a police department I'm surprised they didn't have some kind of training on that. Not necessarily even anything super-sophisticated, but enough to know not to click on an unexpected attachment in a suspicious looking email.
It sounds to me like an utterly manufactured incident. Getting an email attachment bit of malware is not the hallmark of state-sponsored hack attacks. The people who are saying that it is are liars, plain and simple. It is not a mistake, it is an intentional lie. This is pretty clear when you consider that they immediately jump to blame Iran, who has done an astonishing amount of 'attacking' for not having any casualties or injuries or damages of any form, real or imagined, if you listen to the Israeli government. Like 'terrorism' in the West, 'Iran' is the magic word to get increased funding in Israel.
Viruses like this spread in corporations and government organizations every day in the US, Israel, and every other country on the planet. Today, it was convenient for them to pretend like it was a big deal in Israel because they want more money. So, they lie to a public that, on the majority, knows nothing about technical matters and is scared by them, and they claim that some ridiculous weak sauce malware was almost the end of the universe.
It's just pricking the amygdala of an ignorant public in order to urge the herd in a desired direction, and nothing else. The bottom line with cyber-security is that governments are the last organizations that should be involved in trying to research it. It is a matter of complexity, exact precision, and delicacy. You can NOT compromise on ONE single aspect of it. If you do, for any reason whatsoever, then you've destroyed all the other work done on security. Political organizations cannot stomach the exactness, the tolerance for failure necessary, to get real work done. They weren't designed for it, and they can't just magically get it done by accident. That won't stop them from telling everyone the boogieman is stuffing hacker 'wares' in all their holes and that if they just shovel enough gold into the magic pockets of the tax collector that everything will be alright, of course.
Comments
I guess I'm a bit surprised some of them fell for this. That's a pretty typical/textbook/well-known attack vector. Given that they're a police department I'm surprised they didn't have some kind of training on that. Not necessarily even anything super-sophisticated, but enough to know not to click on an unexpected attachment in a suspicious looking email.
It sounds to me like an utterly manufactured incident. Getting an email attachment bit of malware is not the hallmark of state-sponsored hack attacks. The people who are saying that it is are liars, plain and simple. It is not a mistake, it is an intentional lie. This is pretty clear when you consider that they immediately jump to blame Iran, who has done an astonishing amount of 'attacking' for not having any casualties or injuries or damages of any form, real or imagined, if you listen to the Israeli government. Like 'terrorism' in the West, 'Iran' is the magic word to get increased funding in Israel.
Viruses like this spread in corporations and government organizations every day in the US, Israel, and every other country on the planet. Today, it was convenient for them to pretend like it was a big deal in Israel because they want more money. So, they lie to a public that, on the majority, knows nothing about technical matters and is scared by them, and they claim that some ridiculous weak sauce malware was almost the end of the universe.
It's just pricking the amygdala of an ignorant public in order to urge the herd in a desired direction, and nothing else. The bottom line with cyber-security is that governments are the last organizations that should be involved in trying to research it. It is a matter of complexity, exact precision, and delicacy. You can NOT compromise on ONE single aspect of it. If you do, for any reason whatsoever, then you've destroyed all the other work done on security. Political organizations cannot stomach the exactness, the tolerance for failure necessary, to get real work done. They weren't designed for it, and they can't just magically get it done by accident. That won't stop them from telling everyone the boogieman is stuffing hacker 'wares' in all their holes and that if they just shovel enough gold into the magic pockets of the tax collector that everything will be alright, of course.