Technical Storyteller
From the 50th state last week, to the 49th this week. We drove from Anchorage to Valdez, and stopped for the night at the Lake Louise Lodge. It was an overcast day, and it made the colors incredibly vibrant – perfect for photography. A great day shooting was capped off by one of the best salmon dinner’s I’ve ever had.
This week’s Friday Photo is posted on the following Monday due to technical challenges (yep, even engineers sometimes fat finger the keyboard).
Several years ago we went to the Big island of Hawaii, and visited the Hilo Zoo. It’s a really cool facility, especially for a small town. Near the entrance there’s a lake, and the lilies were in full bloom. The day was so still that the water perfectly reflected the cascading flowers – all that’s missing is a big bullfrog on one of the pads.
In the past couple of weeks, there’s been a number of stories breathlessly proclaiming that one state endured 150,000 ‘hack attempts’ on election day, that another was hit five times per second, 24 hours per day prior to the election, and so forth. But notice how none of the articles talk about how many ‘hack attempts’ were made the day after the election? Or the month before? Or six months after?
Now I don’t have access to the actual data from those states, but I strongly suspect that these numbers, while legitimate, are being spun to grind a political axe. Any IP address is going to be hit with port scans on a regular basis. Government sites are absolutely hit with many thousands of both targeted and drive-by probes. Sure, there might have been an uptick in activity approaching the election, but what I really want to know is how many focused, targeted sophisticated attacks happened versus non-election season? Then we might actually know something. We need a baseline of both general and targeted attack traffic to be able to judge if there’s anything statistically significant in the data – and ideally, to have comparison data for the previous election too. Until then, well, folks should take partial data with a grain of salt.
One last note – I am surprised that only 39 states report hacking attempts. Either the bad guys were slacking, or we have 11 states that don’t have good monitoring in place.