A Cybersecurity Firm’s Sharp Rise and Stunning Collapse

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/11/04/a-cybersecurity-firms-sharp-rise-and-stunning-collapse

by jontaydev • 7 years ago

127 33 7 years ago

Here is a proper news article for those who can do without a dozen pages of drivel about the CEO's hairdo, flying lessons, and underwear shopping: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/03/18/fbi_raids_cybersecu...

jvehent• 7 years ago

76-97 minutes read

indeed...

ianhawes• 7 years ago

Thats a good way to phrase it. About 1/4 way through the article I realized I wasn't anywhere close to the end.

notzuck4• 7 years ago

Whilst theregister.co.uk does get straight to the point. the newyorker article tells a very interesting story about his work in hacking P2P, working with the secret service, trying to sell his software to the FBI, GPS tracking his mates cheating wife etc.

Ozumandias• 7 years ago

Yeah, people on here don't seem to understand that you read the New Yorker for narrative and literary craft, not for getting information as fast as possible.

willbw• 7 years ago

Some people find the details interesting. Life isn't always about processing information as quickly as possible

robocat3• 7 years ago

Normally I prefer El Reg but that is dry and uninformative, whereas the New Yorker article rocks a heap of other critical information.

Most importantly they are colouring in the people and their flaws, without specifically labelling them (e.g. psycho/sociopathic is never said, but the behaviours are).

The interactions with politicians and federal entities are critical to understanding the story.

What you see as irrelevant information is all extremely relevent if you care about protecting yourself against fraud, manipulation, bad actors, etcetera.

Think about the legal and social context of this article, and you will see other facets of the reporting that are clever.

robocat3• 7 years ago

The El Reg persona:

I am a middle aged intelligent man who used to be an engineer, and now I have moved up the ranks. I work in IT for a droll company, so I can afford some toys and vacations, and a bit because I just like hardware.

I treat El Reg like a British pub, where wit is appreciated, and sometimes we talk about "the war" (our collective past), and certainly taking the piss out of ourselves and everyone else is a good laff.

I also need to know some of what El Reg writes about for work; at least they make it fun, unlike most of the rest of my job where much of the pleasure is black.

SlowRobotAhead• 7 years ago

I thought it was going to be Crowdstrike. But I suppose that hasn’t happened yet.

Whatever tech, whatever assets, whatever they have, you can do as you will, I would need to have my head in the sand to be doing business with them. Too much smoke not to be at least a little fire. Just my opinion of course!

Edit: One of those times practicality clashes with politics apparently. Can’t say anything bad about the company that failed to protect high profile clients, then used that failure to help start the Trump/Russia fiasco before quietly walking their statements back - because to be aware of that would mean supporting the bad man.

katbyte• 7 years ago

Could you elaborate on Crowdstrike?

chelmzy• 7 years ago

Just purchased their product as it is at the top of the EDR market. Could you explain your comment?

cerved• 7 years ago

Ahaha, the fake memoir

baobabKoodaa• 7 years ago

The author seems to confuse peer-to-peer file sharing networks and onion routing. The explanations in the article don't make any sense.

armitron• 7 years ago

What doesn't make sense? Limewire is P2P.

My impression of the -sparse- darknet mentions is that they were independently (= not through their P2P monitoring software) looking for useful data there and manually inserting it into their datastore.

danso2• 7 years ago

I didn't see any mention of onion routing. There's several references to the "Deep Web", but that's in the context of file-sharing peer-to-peer networks.

gwern3• 7 years ago

I was also a little puzzled by

In the nineties, Microsoft pursued a canonical FUD strategy, creating phony error messages to make consumers wary of using Windows on a competitor’s operating system—a tactic that resulted in a legal settlement exceeding two hundred million dollars.

acdha• 7 years ago

I believe that’s a reference to this code and the resulting court case:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code

lanevsky• 7 years ago

Cybersecurity is not security? Like Anonymous cryptocurrencies are pseudo-anonymous? https://inechain.com/blog/what-are-anonymous-cryptocurrencie...

gwern3• 7 years ago

“Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.” — Clay Shirky

https://kk.org/thetechnium/the-shirky-prin/

GhettoMaestro• 7 years ago

What the hell did I just read? Wow.

A Cybersecurity Firm’s Sharp Rise and Stunning Collapse

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