alt Hacker NewsPeople are so wanting to believe there was an advanced cyber attack to Venezuela’s grid and ISPs that they forget this is a country that hasn’t updated its infrastructure in more than two decades while also not providing any significant maintenance. Most of the “new” technology deployed at the state and federal level comes from corrupt foreign and domestic “suitcase” companies that charged a lot of money to deliver poorly designed systems often even lacking the as-sold equipment. So Venezuela isn’t precisely the most formidable adversary when it comes to cybersecurity.
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This is CANTV they are talking about. This is the company I requested a new phone line from and it took 9.5 years to get it installed.
After waiting for 3 years, I gave up ended up paying one of their technicians I randomly found working in the street. He gave me a phone line that apparently used to belong to a taxi company, judging by all the wrong number calls I got. All that just to get 4mbps DSL service in 2019.
Last year, out of nowhere, I finally got a call from the company saying they were ready to install it.
Thankfully, a bunch of companies appeared out of nowhere (a lot of them with links to people in the govt, surprise) in 2020 and we got fiber.
Oh and a couple of years ago, my parents "lost" their phone line and have been without POTS ever since. Maybe it's karma for me paying for a phone line all those years ago...
1. There was a cyber attack on the Venezuelan power grid. This disrupted comms coming into the attack and made it much harder to coordinate a response.
2. It was not in any way related to this BGP, of which, as someone in networking, looks like a simple and fairly common mistake. It wouldn't really buy them anything anyway, the breach happened 6+ months before.
People also wanting to believe there was even a need for sophisticated cybersecurity attack in the first place. In a country where average household income is around $230 per month. In much wealthier country like Russia you can literally buy dump of all possible leaked data on any person for $1 and for $100 you can get all information government have about a person including camera and mobile phone tracking, etc.
And Venezuela is very very corrupt country. No cyberattack needed when you can pay $10,000 - $100,000 for a dude to pull the lever or to forget to pull the lever and literally 99.99% of people in a country do it.
Though these theories are easy to explain because people in mostly US community like HN have no understanding of what total corruption look like in a shit hole countries.