You have arrived at the web home of Noah Brier. This is mostly an archive of over a decade of blogging and other writing. You can read more about me or get in touch. If you want more recent writing of mine, most of that is at my BrXnd marketing x AI newsletter and Why Is This Interesting?, a daily email for the intellectually omnivorous.
The most significant discovery is that the attackers had selected employees at the companies with access to proprietary data, then learnt who their friends were. The hackers compromised the social network accounts of those friends, hoping to enhance the probability that their final targets would click on the links they sent.So it turns out it was a Internet Explorer vulnerability they exploited, which makes me ask two questions: First, why were Google folks using IE? Isn't that why they make Chrome? Second (and much more serious), if this turns out to be a coordinated attack by the Chinese government (now it's being reported oil companies were hit with something similar), what happens? I mean that's pretty serious stuff. Is there a scenario where we would go to war over information security? It's scary stuff.