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Not too worried about the Muskovites and the government IT systems [1]
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Date: 2025-02-09
So, just an opinion here... from a long-time IT guy. For those afraid of the Muskovites getting in and changing code in the various systems the US government uses.
1. I sincerely doubt that they know COBOL, which is quite likely what most of the systems are coded in. These kids are so young that they probably haven't coded in anything except Python or languages like that. Changing code in COBOL is a challenge, even for an experienced programmer. Just getting the code to compile and link is a bitch sometimes. And since I suspect most of the systems are on mainframes, they'd have to know how to access and use them, a skill most 20 year olds don't have. Can anyone say JCL? Or S0C7? Or S0C4? Do they even know what an LRECL is?
2. I REALLY hope that all of the US government IT departments make frequent backups of their systems, just like any other corporation does. In the corporate world, there are extensive revision control packages that can revert software to a previous version. Now, this being the government, I don't know for sure, but for mission critical applications, I can't believe that this isn't in place. Again, these kids would need to know HOW to destroy past revisions of code, which given the complexity of revision control packages, isn't likely.
3. Now, stolen databases and information by the Muskovites is entirely possible. Again, from a corporate standpoint, much of this data is encrypted at the source, I would hope that government would encrypt PII as well. And just the sheer amount of data being maintained is probably in the terms of petabytes or more. Not something you can easily download to a carryable drive.
So I'm not TOO concerned about them inserting back doors etc into code, I'd be more concerned about them ATTEMPTING to make changes, and breaking the system.
Yes, I am assuming that government systems are running legacy software... Because even the most modern systems may be running software so old no one touches it because they don't want to break it. I may be wrong, but until someone tells me Treasury is programmed in Python or something new, I'm not going to worry.
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