Q: Did AI concoct the cockamamie formula by which Dementia Putin’s tariffs were calculated?
A: Signs point to Yes.
Q: Did the White Outhouse deny this and try to make their calculations appear more thoughtful?
A: Of course.
Q: Did their mystification effort show competence in math and economics?
A: Come on, man!
Follow the f*ckery:
I want to see a driver 100% gcc. Zero warnings. Go.
Roll that glorious egg roll footage
I picked Rocket League as the test title. Bad idea. Branch to compatibility drivers
Being inside #pacman.d reminded me to enable Multilib.
WARP TO STEAM
Our hero is distracted by #ChaoticAUR
50 minutes and we're in a desktop environment, plus nvidia-open-beta-dkms compiled/installed using yay
Am I hip yet
Currently trying to #speedrun an #archlinux install, plus #Nvidia and #steam
3) Why on earth would anybody use PowerSchool, given all of the above? Several reasons:
- As SISes go, it's quite affordable for what it can do
- Current breach notwithstanding, their hosted instances are generally well-maintained
- Combine those two, and it's ideal for small districts and especially independent charter schools that can't afford an IT department or self-hosting
- As anybody involved with health care records can attest, every system sucks, so you pick the least crappy 17/n
2) SIS is a uniquely vulnerable product in the PowerSchool ecosystem. PowerSchool was initially created in the early 1990s by Apple, back when databases weren't encrypted by default and nothing was cloud-hosted anyway. The code has changed hands multiple times since, with owners including Pearson Education and finally PowerSchool Inc. Everybody has done their part to improve the system, but backwards-compatibility issues mean that a lot of "legacy" vulnerabilities exist. 16/n
Other questions that have arisen in the context of the #PowerSchool #breach / #hack in no particular order:
1) PowerSchool uses Snowflake for some of their data warehousing/analytics. That platform, however, was not affected by this breach; only their SIS product. The SIS uses Oracle 19g as its database and is hosted on Microsoft Azure. 15/n
I have been informed that there are two "part 6" pieces of this thread. Those responsible for the numbering have been sacked.
The webinar in question: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Bzk-9h-UnkR3nUA-mGWXRVDvkivE9Met/view?usp=sharing 12/n
Interestingly, PowerSchool (the company) was bought last October by Bain Capital. So at least there's no stock price to tank? https://www.powerschool.com/bain-capital/ 11/n
The CEO and CISO held a webinar today, which I'll post once available (my recording didn't capture the first 18 minutes, which is when all the important stuff was covered). 10/n
The big part now is cleanup, given the exposure of PII. Every state's rules/regs are different regarding notification and mitigation, and are different again depending on whether it's employee data or student data. So it's taking them a minute, but they will begin contacting affected customers next week-ish. 9/n
So what's being done? If your PowerSchool SIS instance is cloud hosted, the Maintenance account has been disabled on the instance side. Additionally, PowerSchool (the company) has put a VPN wall up for their internal-facing PowerSource, so it should be significantly harder for someone to enter any - much less hundreds - of SIS instances undetected. 8/n
Over the holidays (i.e. when all your super-knowledgeable folks are on vacation and your support staff is a bunch of rookies), an attacker, probably pretending to be a school in distress, managed to exfiltrate the PowerSource credentials of a low-level tech. Once into PowerSource, the attacker could (and did) get Maintenance tokens for every server they so desired. Overnight, they used those tokens to run a Data Export script to dump CSV copies of the aforementioned Student/Teacher records. 7/n
When you open a support ticket, the tech on the other end will likely need to log into your SIS instance to help troubleshoot/debug/solve. They do this using a so-called Maintenance account: an account with god-level powers that's not attached to a username/password. Instead, it gets authorized via a token from PowerSource. 6/n