Restating my love for Internet Archive and my plea to put a grownup in charge of the thing.
Washington Post: The organization has “industry standard” security systems, Kahle said, but he added that, until this year, the group had largely stayed out of the crosshairs of cybercriminals. Kahle said he’d opted not to prioritize additional investments in cybersecurity out of the Internet Archive’s limited budget of around $20 million to $30 million a year.
Military grade has different meanings. I’ve worked in the electronics industry a long time and will say with confidence that the pcbs and chips we sent to the military were our best. Higher temperature ranges, much more thorough environmental testing, many more thermal and humidity cycles, lots more vibration testing. However we also sell them for 5-10x our regular prices but in much lower quantities. It’s a failed meme in many instances as the internet uses it though.
Hot take, this is the way it should be. If you want better security then you update the requirements to get your certification.
Security by its very nature has a problem of knowing when to stop. There's always better security for an ever increasing amount of money and companies don't sign off on budgets of infinity dollars and projects of indefinite length. If you want security at all you have bound the cost and have well-defined stopping points.
And since 5 security experts in a room will have 10 different opinions on what those stopping points should be— what constitutes "good-enough" they only become meaningful when there's industry wide agreement on them.
There never will be an adequate industry-wide certification. There is no universal “good enough” or “when to stop” for security. What constitutes “good enough” is entirely dependent on what you are protecting and who you are protecting it from, which changes from system to system and changes from day to day.
The budget that it takes to protect against a script kiddy is a tiny fraction of the budget it takes to protect from a professional hacker group, which is a fraction of what it takes to protect from nation state-funded trolls. You can correctly decide that your security is “good enough” one day, but all it takes is a single random news story or internet comment to put a target on your back from someone more powerful, and suddenly that “good enough” isn’t good enough anymore.
The Internet Archive might have been making the correct decision all this time to invest in things that further its mission rather than burning extra money on security, and it seems their security for a long time was “good enough”… until it wasn’t.
We can’t all have the latest EPYC processors with the latest bug fixes using Secure Enclaves and homomorphic encryption for processing user data while using remote attestation of code running within multiple layers of virtualization. With, of course, that code also being written in Rust, running on a certified microkernel, and only updatable when at least 4 of 6 programmers, 1 from each continent, unite their signing keys stored on HSMs to sign the next release. All of that code is open source, by the way, and has a ratio of 10 auditors per programmer with 100% code coverage and 0 external dependencies.
Then watch as a kid fakes a subpoena using a hacked police account and your lawyers, who receive dozens every day, fall for it.
No, it’s your demeanor that is unbecoming and not worth engaging with. Villianizing your poor behavior not successfully baiting people into replying as you want is childish too. Take a breather.
A non-grownup analysis is to criticize a decision in hindsight. If Internet Archive shifted funds to security, it would mean cutting something from its mission. Given their history, it makes sense IMHO to spend on the mission and take the risk. As long as they have backups, a little downtime won't hurt them - it's not a bank or a hospital.
Downtime aside, best practices for running a library generally include not leaking usernames, email addresses, and eight years of front desk correspondence.
They sell paid services to universities and governments, so downtime isn't a great look either.
> best practices for running a library generally include not leaking usernames, email addresses, and eight years of front desk correspondence
That's incorrect IMHO: You are describing outcomes; practices are about procedures. In particular, necessary to the understanding and use of best practices is that do not guarantee outcomes.
Any serious management balances risks, which includes the inevitability, though unpredictable, of negative outcomes. It's impossible to prevent them - not NASA, airlines, surgeons, etc, can prevent them all, and they accept that.
It's a waste of resources to spend more preventing them than you lose overall. Best practices do not provide perfect outcomes; they provide the most reduced trade-offs in risk and cost.
Washington Post: The organization has “industry standard” security systems, Kahle said, but he added that, until this year, the group had largely stayed out of the crosshairs of cybercriminals. Kahle said he’d opted not to prioritize additional investments in cybersecurity out of the Internet Archive’s limited budget of around $20 million to $30 million a year.
https://archive.ph/XzmN2