Comment by mschuster91
9 days ago
Well, given that way too many companies in the critical infrastructure sector don't give a fuck about how to keep their systems up and we have been facing a hybrid war from Russia for the last few years that is expected to escalate in a full on NATO hot war in a few years, yes it absolutely does make sense for the government to force such companies to be resilient against Russians.
Just because wherever country you are at doesn't have to prepare for a hot war with Russia doesn't mean we don't have to. When the Russians come in and attack, hell even if they "just" attack Poland with tanks and the rest of us with cyber warfare, the last thing we need is power plants, telco infra, traffic infrastructure or hospitals going out of service because their core systems got hit by ransomware.
> it absolutely does make sense for the government to force such companies
Problem is, a) governments are infiltrated by russian assets and b) governments are known to enforce detrimental IT regulations. Germany especially so.
> power plants, telco infra, traffic infrastructure or hospitals
Their system _will_ get hit by ransomware or APTs. It is not possible to mandate common sense or proper IT practices, no matter how strict the law. See the recent incident in South Korea with burned down data center with no backups.
> Problem is, a) governments are infiltrated by russian assets and b) governments are known to enforce detrimental IT regulations. Germany especially so.
The regulations are a framework called "BSI Grundschutz" and all parts are freely available for everyone [1]. Even if our government were fully corrupted by Russia like Orban's Hungary - just look at the regulations on their face values and tell me what exactly you would see as "detrimental" or against best practice?
> It is not possible to mandate common sense or proper IT practices, no matter how strict the law. See the recent incident in South Korea with burned down data center with no backups.
I think it actually is. The BSI Grundschutz criteria tend to feel "checkboxy", but if you tick all the checkboxes you'll end up with a pretty resilient system. And yes, I've been on the implementing side.
The thing is, even if you're not fully compliant with BSI Grundschutz... if you just follow parts of it in your architecture, your security and resilience posture is already much stronger than much of the competition.
[1] https://www.bsi.bund.de/DE/Themen/Unternehmen-und-Organisati...
Government isn’t perfect but I’d be interested to know what alternative you propose?
a) Incarceration time for IT execs and responsible engineers.
b) Let companies go out of business once they fail to protect their own crucial data.
None of that is possible.
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