The national guard here is looking around for men in black masks in front of computers throughout the city. Its crazy
this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2025
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Is this a joke or are you serious?
Goddamn it, I can't tell anymore
They found him
It's a joke....
Oh wonderful. Replacing all IT because they were hacked? Let me guess, they will use Windows, Exchange, and MS Office again on the new system. The software triumvirate screaming "please hack me".
Project manager: at least I can blame the vendor
Entirely seriously, yes.
Most project managers I've ever met or known or worked with are basically incompetent technically, and very insecure / in denial about that, and thus vastly prefer the 'safe' option of someone else being responsible over the 'risk' of... hiring actual quality people that can make/support their own quality product.
Did you consider that project managers often have to follow all sorts of company standards, have to figure out a way to get a dozen departments with conflicting standards together, on top of that have to catch the stupid ideas from the upper-management and marketing without telling the upper-management that they have no idea what they are talking about, on top of getting something actually done in the project?
Because often the level of tech competency has very little to do with the decision corridor that the project manager has, given everything else.
Yep.
I've been one.
Thats how I know what I am saying.
Like you're not even challenging what I'm saying really, you admit that most PMs are technically incompetent, because their job is mainly playing office politics.
It didn't used to be this way.
And it still doesn't have to be.
A good PM is someone who actually knows their relevant field, and can also do some office politics, but much more importantly, is a responsible and helpful team leader.
A person with only an MBA just has a degree in how to play office politics and gaslight people.
It's always been that way, and always will be. Most people are mediocre at most things.
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https://techxplore.com/news/2025-07-fbi-national-st-paul-cyber.html
So, this actually was first detected on Friday July 25, escalated all the way up to the Emergency Operations Center on July 28 (Monday), state of emergency / near total intranet shut down (they are quarantineing the whole system) on July 29 (Tuesday).
It seems to me that some kind of rather sophisticated threat actor managed to get into the core ... this techxplore article calls it a 'VPN', but it isn't technically a VPN, its a secure access tunnel system that city-gov systems and employees use to talk to each other, it almost certainly is not intended to be geared toward broad internet access/usage, beyond accepting user input from public facing government web portals, such as say, people paying their utliity bills online or trying to submit a business liscense application online, things like that.
This system is sounding like it got fully compromised (as in, low level/high privilege level access was secured), and was either sending data out/in through improper IP addresses, and/or was possibly being hijacked to do some kind of DOS attack ... on itself?
I am having a really hard time finding any exact details on this, but this is my best guess.
Given that the EOC essentially immediately shutdown everything and called in a National Guard Cybersecurity team, it seems to me that there is a high chance this was done by basically a nation-state level threat actor.
It also at least seems like the systems, the data, the hardware, have at least not yet been locked down in a ransomware style move, which... could be largely due to their just quickly pulling the whole thing offline, or could be because that wasn't the goal of the attackers... or some combination of both.
Yeah that's a vpn
but at least Abilene was insured against such an attack
Oh, well that's great. I hope the people, whose identity, medical records, or whatever else was stolen will be compensated accordingly. Would be a shame if the money went into building a new, just as unsafe system.
Not that anyone gives a fuck. At this point the argument is "your data had probably already been stolen somewhere else"...
Isn't there an upcoming election in St. Paul?
Minneapolis and St Paul (Cross-River sister cities, St Paul is the State Capital) both have mayoral elections on November 4, 2025. The one you’ve been seeing mentioned more likely is the Minneapolis one where the DFL (State Democratic Party) endorsed a candidate for the first time in a bit and it was the challenger to the incumbent Democratic candidate, so it’s been in the news.
Had to read the article to realise st Paul is a city name. 😅
Also, could it be a 'the call is coming from inside the house " situation?
I remember pedo party hating this mayor. It was all over lemmy during simpler times.
Also, could it be a 'the call is coming from inside the house " situation?
I think this is far more likely than China, North Korea, Iran or Russia having a sudden interest in St Paul Minnesota (a city that most people in the US don't even think about).
Who benefits more from the crippling of city-level liberal governments and stealing their data, Trump or China? If we see ICE conducting surgical raids within St Paul in the coming months, I think we'll have our answer.
Probably not the mayor, the governor of the state was the VP candidate for Kamala Harris.
With no ransom demand it's gotta be a state actor probing defenses and testing responses, right? I think first guesses would be Russia, China, Iran or maybe North Korea.
first guesses
Not so sure. Arent they known for being a queer friendly town?
Yes we are
So probably some fuckers you paid for with fed taxes. We should really stop doing that.
Or some bored teenager somewhere
...perhaps the U nited S tates should handle that...
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