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...
Utah, #1 projected tech sector growth in the next decade, of all 50 states.
Utah, #8 for tech sector % of entire state economy, of all 50 states.
Minnesota?
Doesn't crack top 10 for any metrics.
Utah may not be the biggest or techiest state, but it is way more so than Minnesota.
The National Guard just seems like a desperate move.
Again, this is my argument, but you are only seeing desperation as due to incompetence, not due to... actual severity.
When they're deployed, they take orders from the the federal military,
Not actually true unless the Nat Guard has been given a direct command by the Pentagon.
and at peace, monitoring foreign threats seems like a federal thing.
... which is why the FBI were called in, in addition to the Nat Guard being able to report up the military CoC.
You call in the National Guard to put down a riot or something where you just need bodies, not for anything niche.
I mean, you yourself have explained that the Nat Guard does have a CyberSec ability, and I've explained they also have the ability to potentially summon even greater CyberSec ability.
I guess you would be surprised how involved the military is / can be in defending against national security threatening, critical infrastructure comprimising kinds of domestic threats.
Remember Stuxnet?
Yeah other people can do that to us now, we kinda uncorked the genie bottle on that one.
Otherwise, just call a local cybersecurity firm to trace the attack and assess damage.
It is not everyone's instinct or best practice to immediately hire a contracted firm to do things that government agencies can, and have a responsibility to do.
If this was like, Amazon being comprimised, yeah I can see that being a more likely avenue, though if it was serious, they'd probably call in some or multiple forms of 'the Feds' as well.
But this was a breach/compromise of a municipal network... thats a government thing. Not a private sector thing.
EDIT:
Also, you are acting like either you are unaware of the following, or ... don't think its real?
Kind of a really big deal in terms of Utah and the tech sector and the Federal government and... things that were totally illegal before the PATRIOT Act.
Exabytes of storage.
Exabytes.
Utah literally is where the NSA is doing their damndest to make a hardcopy of literally all internet traffic and content.
Given how classified this facility is, I wouldn't be surprised if their employees don't exactly show up in standard Utah employment figures.
I will never lose the ability and my services will always be needed.
You are a highly, highly specialized, but also simultaneously low skilled worker who can only work with a very specific set of services, which are all paygated by vendors, who will immediately jack the fuck up out of their pricing as soon as they are able.
You are delusional.
Even in some hyper dystopia where all coding is outsourced to an AI, all you are is a prompt generator.
Do you think an AI that can write inefficient code... cannot write prompts?
And the vibe coder is also blissfully unaware of all the zero days he/she has also deployed along with his prompted autocomplete output of a program.
Great work! Very efficient!
I'm totally sure said program doesn't also needlessly pull in a gigantic mess of additional libraries, just to use one or two functions from it, I'm sure this is a very compute and memory efficient program.
And I am totally sure this will all work great and be easily reconfigured to keep up with any changing requirements, because we all know software devs always get very concrete, stable, and well defined requirements to work with.
And now we understand why MSFT buying github a some years back was a really big deal actually, and not just some kind of mostly neutral, generic expansionary business move.
Sure. But VPNs were around long before the consumer-oriented VPNs were a thing.
No argument there, you're right.
(technically =P)
Or they just had one person handling their IT and needed help, and didn't want to pay an outside contractor.
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 local mini-FEMA, who have their own capacities to order around other local agencies, but also have a whole bunch of protocols for... who to contact when something exceeds the capacity of everything they can more or less order around with their own authority.
I'm honestly surprised the National Guard was called at all. If If anything, that shows how backwards Minnesota is, or at least the mayor of St. Paul.
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 DHS 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.
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).
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.
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/fancy proxies 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.
I am not exactly sure what the CoC of escalation pathways is here, but it seems like this got escalated to as many people as the Municipal Emergency Response Team could, quite rapidly.
Its 'the emergency response team looked at this for 24 hours and then called in another emergency response team'.
I mean, myself personally, I prefer to simp and fanboy for my favorite exploitative corperate overlord, because I'm sure there are good reasons everyone uses them, despite their well documented history of massive fuckups and fuckovers of all possible kinds!
Just, full stop, MAGA is a death cult, same as Jim Jones or Heaven's Gate.
Big death cult? Popular death cult, takes over the government?
Fascism.
For all the sociological, political, economic complexities and nuance...
It really does basically just boil down to those being pretty much the same thing, at different scales.
Good luck reasoning with or expecting reason from death cult members.
They are the zombie apocalpyse, fucking broken brains, really only fully functional at the limbic level, the rest of the brain is a confused mush of near infinite levels of reality denial, motivated reasoning, and cognitive dissonance.
Though, if I am understanding this right, paracentesis typically is targetted at... some kind of fluid build up basically outside of the actual gastrointestinal tract, in the paracenteal cavity, the space between your abdominal muscles and organs...
... the procedure does seem to outwardly more resemble this cow fart valve in appearence, but it doesn't actually directly pierce, go into the intenstine directly.
Maybe not strictly illegal, but ... as best I can tell, not really currently totally, explicitly legal.
Kind of a gray area, I guess I mean that I think it will become more normalized and 'more' legal.