It appears personal devices were also impacted by this via Microsoft Intune. That app is presented to employees as a way to get their email/slack on their personal device without giving IT systems access to it.
IT systems around the country say that they have no access to your personal data and there they can only block access to Intune apps.
But the linked reddit thread[1] in this article notes personal devices getting wiped and locked out.
Intune has two modes. Device registration and User registration. And two kinds of wipes, retire and wipe. Retire means only delete your work profile and is only available for User registration mdm. Sounds like Stryker didn't configure intune properly for byod to force users with personal devices to use User registration.
Beyond that there are so many other things in intune you can use to prevent this sort of thing. Short lived / JIT credentials with MFA, ip restrictions, multi admin approval, rbac (role based fine tuned permissions eg help desk can't wipe, only retire ) etc. sounds like there were some big misses here.
Also sounds like they were in the system long enough to exfiltrate 50+ TB of data without setting off alarm bells.
Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) MDM profiles typically don't allow personal data access outside of their sandbox, but they almost always include remote wipe capabilities.
iOS at least displays a very clear warning when you import the profile telling you exactly what it can do.
Not that this isn't awful, but it's good to be clear on what this can do when used within normal expectations.
Knowing InTune MDM setup, it has two modes, control a few apps or control entire phone. iOS will tell you during setup what's happening and I've been at plenty of companies where employees are told "It's just for our apps" but it's really full Device Control. $TwoCompaniesAgo tried that "It's just for our applications" but when I went to install it, iOS went "This is 100% full device control" and I rejected it.
Stryker is far more than ambulance gurneys. They’re one of the largest med-tech suppliers, with equipment in operating rooms, ICUs, and surgical departments everywhere.
If a wiper actually hit internal systems, the bigger concern isn’t consumer data but disruption to manufacturing, logistics, and hospital support. That kind of outage could ripple through a lot of hospitals pretty quickly.
So gain access to a machine that can ask microsoft intune to eviscerate the company, ask it to do so, done. Bit of a shame all the machines had that installed really. Reminds me of crowdstrike.
My 95% bet is that the attacker just gained access to an account with suitable privileges and then went on to use existing automation. The fact that it’s intune is largely irrelevant - I’m not aware of any safeguards that any provider would implemen.
So the options here are MDM or no MDM and that’s a hard choice. No MDM means that you have to trust all people to get things as basic as FDE or a sane password policy right. No option to wipe or lock lost devices. No option to unlock devices where people forgot their password. Using an MDM means having a privileged attack vector into all machines.
How does that look exactly? Someone has to be able to use MDM to manage devices or there’s no point in having it. This scenario is firmly in rubber hose/crescent wrench cryptanalysis territory. Can updates have delays with approval gates built in? Does MDM need a break glass capability?
Do not use global admin or admin account as daily driver for one. Dont save it in browser etc either.
Limit roles, even within the application, here Intune.
Office 365 also has conditional access and many policy leavers to tweak, many cases of people locking themselves OUT of 365. So the gates work but you need to configure them.
For Stryker specifically? We don't and probably won't know details.
For companies in general? Background checks, security clearance etc are done if the company determines this necessary and are willing to pay for the process and higher salary.
Well, all the machines in the current outfit are Linux as far as I know. Services are self hosted. Seems to be fine, teams et al run adequately in a browser for talking to people on other stacks.
Previous place had a corporate controlled windows laptop that made a very poor thin client for accessing dev machines. One before that had a somewhat centrally managed macbook that made a very poor thin client for accessing dev machines.
You don't have to soul bond to Microsoft to get things done.
I don't see how Linux would prevent anything if company wants similar controls on their machines. Like tracking update status, forcing updates when needed, potentially wiping entire device when stolen and so on. Fault really is not the OS but the control corporate wants over their devices. And it does make some sense.
Indeed. You'd expect a corporate IT system to be able to ssh as root into all their devices. And the cloud is even worse: if you get hold of the right IAM role, you can simply delete everything! That does usually get locked behind proper 2FA, but it's not impossible to phish even experienced admins once in a while.
All the Linux kernel development work is organized around a mailing list, and some private IRC chats for the core people. It's the technology of the nineties but it works for them.
A lot of corporate stuff seems to be much worse than even a random vibe coded web app. I have to book holiday through something called "HR Connect", watching pages load laboriously and redirect every login through several very long URLs. Slowly.
Yes, the Linux kernel people can be trusted to manage their own machines. Random corp employees cannot. Also corp machines are corp property, not the employees own. If you have 1000 or 10,000 machines you need to manage them. Full stop.
Yes, many corporate websites are bad. Like ERP or HR systems. None of that has to do with device management, RMMs/MDMs or Intune.
Microsoft keeps disappointing and chief technology officers keep paying them. Wasn’t Elon Musk supposed to prove you could vibe code their entire product line? What happened to all that?
An alternative is people install the software they choose to on the machines they're using. Optionally write a list of suggested programs down somewhere.
In that world, there is no central IT team pushing changes to machines and arguing with developers about whether they really need to be able to run a debugger.
I don't know how to keep windows machines alive. It's probably harder.
I, for one, don't really want employees to install video games, porn cam clients, torrenting apps, shady vpn clients, crypto miners, remote access tools, dns "optimizers" and more generally viruses on their work computers.
- Ensure the machines are up-to-date and users are not just indefinitely postponing OS updates?
- Same as above but with programs/software
- How do you ensure correct settings configuration in terms of security? Say default browser, extensions, program access etc?
- Re-image or reinstall the OS when there are issues or PC handover to another employee? Manually with a USB stick?
This kind of control exists and is needed for Linux and MacOS too. RMM is not a Windows only thing...
The critics here see Intune but what if they used another RMM and they compromised another cloud RMM account? Same issue.
Also, here there is no "arguing". They order the software from our portal and it gets pushed into Company Portal via Intune...
Write down a list you say... idk what to say. You have only worked for small startups I gather? Nothing wrong with that but please recognize that these types of limits and programs are not deployed for fun or to ruin your day.
I hear zero-trust is a trendy buzzword at the moment, so let's apply the basic idea here: having a hard shell and a soft and chewy center is not a security posture that works, in practice. You need to harden at every level. RMM uber-admin credentials are the ultimate soft center: you compromise those, you can kill the entire IT infrastructure. The only alternative is to distribute access: have multiple smaller IT teams that adminster small parts of the system, with more 'central' roles providing services but not having full control of most machines. It's not a fun option, but it might also work a lot better if each team can actually adjust policies for the environment they're working in as opposed to trying to have one completely unified policy for an entire multi-thousand employee company. And, for critical systems, I would seriously consider the wisdom of having a remote 'wipe and reformat' button at all.
At a bare minimum, your backup systems should have a completely disjoint set of credentials to your main systems, stored and controlled differently, ideally by a seperate team, if you have the resources.
(And the arguing becomes a problem when IT ceases to consider their job to be solving problems for users within some constraints, and just starts to consider their job to be enforcing those constraints. This also mixes badly with incompetence, which tends to turn everything into a tedious tick-box exercise that neither improves security nor solves user's problems. It's not a good time to have an IT department that can't resist any new security checkbox a vendor offers but can't figure out how to work any of their fancy tools to make life even the slightest bit smoother for their users)
On HN, if you have a valid point but get unnecessarily aggressive about it, people will downvote you for attitude. This mostly keeps the forum under control.
I am sorry and I get carried away sometimes but it is frustrating seeing comments from cowboy devs saying to just give everyone admin, have an excel sheet of software and have people manage their own PC and to get rid of IT just because as here they got phished or breached.
That works for a 5 person company but not a 1000 person company. Or a 10 person company with 1000 machines.
I used to work in test automation for a huge company with terribly annoying IT. I can tell you for a fact that our entire department had well-developed workarounds for the most annoying policies. We even had a few intune 0-days that we literally kept to ourselves to be able to do our jobs properly.
Because in the end, it’s not IT on the line for their odious policies causing late delivery, it was us.
What was so annoying? Having to reboot for Windows updates/programs and MS Defender running?
Also, if the company is certified in some way there are audits for these things, you understand? Such as updates, backups, security, PAM, antivirus etc :)
Subvert these controls intentionally, especially security ones = bye bye. Logs don't lie. We see you.
We never got caught or fired. I won’t detail the 0-days we used because I’m pretty sure the team is still using them, but I can assure you that the logs DID lie.
Does InTune have some sort of check that goes "if over 1% of devices are wiped within a certain timeframe, stop all new device wipe requests"? Seems like it should be a feature, especially if these kinda attacks pick up.
>During TechEd 2014, Emory University's IT department prepared and deployed Windows 7 upgrades to the campuses computers. If you've worked with ConfigMgr at all, you know that there are checks-and-balances that can be employed to ensure that only specifically targeted systems will receive an OS upgrade. In Emory University's case, the check-and-balance method failed and instead of delivering the upgrade to applicable computers, delivered Windows 7 to ALL computers including laptops, desktops, and even servers.
American terrorists are really understanding what might be the consequences when they push people to end of their survival. The people of iran are fighting for their survival and they got nothing to loose.
If by "survival" you mean surviving against a bloodthirsty regime that killed 10,000 people in January alone, then yes: the people of Iran are fighting for survival.
"Tu quoque" comments don't help any discussion. Both the US and Iran are wrong. Iran is wrong for the massacre and the US is wrong for starting a war with Israel against Iran. They are wrong for different reasons. Iran is run by a despotic regime and the US has lost the plot. Possibly Trump is trying to deflect from the Epstein files and create a rally around the flag effect as the midterms approach and doesn't have better ideas to get the public on side. Israel is in the wrong here too.
That's pure Israeli propaganda, and as you see there is absolutely no "up rising" from Iranian citizens. They are however, uniformly against Israel and the US given that we started this illegal war by bombing a girls school and murdering over 170 children. Much like Israel has been doing since its creation in 1948.
"there is absolutely no "up rising" from Iranian citizens"
This is an extremely bold lie. There have been many uprisings by Iranians against their horrible government that are extremely brutally suppressed by said government.
Iranian protesters will be treated as enemies if they support Tehran's foes, the country's top police officer warned, as the Middle East war sparked fears mass anti-government rallies could reignite.
"If anyone comes forward in line with the wishes of the enemy, we will no longer see them as merely a protester, we will see them as an enemy," said national police chief Ahmad-Reza Radan in comments aired by state broadcaster IRIB late on Tuesday.
"And we will do to them what we do to an enemy. We will deal with them in the same way we deal with enemies," he added.
"All our forces are also ready, with their hands on the trigger, prepared to defend their revolution."
His warning comes after the government cracked down on anti-government protests in January, sparked a month before over economic grievances in the sanctions-hit country.
The authorities deemed the protests to be "riots" and Radan at one point issued an ultimatum to protesters to hand themselves in or face the full force of the law.
Iranian authorities acknowledge more than 3000 deaths in the unrest, including members of the security forces and bystanders, but say the violence was caused by "terrorist acts" fuelled by Iran's enemies.
The US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA), however, has recorded more than 7,000 killings in the crackdown, the vast majority protesters, though the toll may be far higher. More than 50,000 have been arrested, it says.
US President Donald Trump had initially cheered on the protesters, threatening to intervene on their behalf as authorities launched a deadly crackdown, but his threats soon shifted to Iran's nuclear programme.
Washington launched strikes with Israel on Iran on February 28, sparking retaliatory strikes by Tehran against Israel and US bases across the Gulf region.
No, the extremely nasty Islamic Theocracy that runs Iran is fighting for its survival after killing 20,000 protestors. Iran police chief has said that anti-government protesters will be treated as 'enemies'. "And we will do to them what we do to an enemy. We will deal with them in the same way we deal with enemies," he added.
Medtech firms consistently underinvest in corporate network cybersecurity because almost all their security and compliance spending goes to device safety requirements, not IT hardening. This is exactly the kind of gap wiper attacks target.
Which in itself wouldn't be too bad, if mobile platforms had proper backup facilities that allowed individuals and enterprises to easily get all their devices to the exact backed up state they were before being wiped. But that seems to be unwanted by Apple and Google...
If Intune wiped personal devices that’s a serious failure. BYOD setups are supposed to wipe only the work container, not the whole phone. Either those devices were fully enrolled in MDM without people realizing or someone pushed the wrong wipe policy during incident response. Would be good to see confirmation from affected employees.
My only knowledge of this company is as a manufacturer of gurneys for ambulances.
I guess they have some sensitive data on our emergency services organizations and their headquarters addresses and accounts payable people, maybe PII on signatories (officers, board members & “important people”) and whatnot.
Probably worse in the boring B2B way, not the consumer-breach way. Stryker is deep in hospital operations, so the immediate risk is supply chain and support disruption rather than leaked patient data. The Krebs post says one hospital system already could not order surgical supplies, and if the Intune remote wipe detail is true, recovering internal devices and admin workflows could take a while even without any medical devices themselves being compromised.
This is not true. The hack did not affect Stryker products sold to hospitals and clinics, it only impacted Stryker employees work and personal devices. Yes 50tb of data was exfiltrated and it remains to be seen what that data is and how it might impact products down the line.
Medical equipment reps often play a pretty active role in patient care. Can't get in touch with a rep to put a device into its MRI safe mode? No MRI for you. Can't get a rep in to help the surgeon with the type in hardware they were going to install? No surgery for you.
People's AICDs aren't going to start exploding, but I'm pretty confident this will hamper care for many patients.
One irony here is that Stryker makes their partners and suppliers jump through so many cybersecurity hoops. I’m talking months and ridiculous demands. Then they get hacked themselves. They should have gotten their own shit together as well.
Most companies are definitely NOT using Yubikeys. Did you work for Google? Nice man :)
MFA in general had to be forced on companies, and then it is most often in software on a phone.
Here are some rough numbers.
google_workspace:
total_active_users: "3 billion (includes free/consumer Gmail)"
paid_business_customers: "11 million companies (2024)"
paid_customer_growth: "+1 million companies in under 1 year (2023-2024)"
global_business_market_share: "~50%"
fortune_500_presence: "minority share, weaker than Microsoft in enterprise"
mfa_with_yubikeys:
internal_google_employees: "100% use hardware keys (Yubikey/Titan) — since 2017"
fido_u2f_origin: "Google co-created U2F standard with Yubico post-Operation Aurora"
estimated_user_adoption_pct: "~1-3% of all Workspace users (inference, not published)"
concentration: "Highest in finance, government, tech/security-conscious orgs"
typical_majority_mfa_method: "TOTP apps (Google Authenticator) or SMS"
enterprise_passkey_deployment_2025: "87% of US/UK enterprises deploying or have deployed passkeys (FIDO Alliance — includes all hardware key types, not Yubikey-specific)"
microsoft_365:
total_active_users: "~270 million (commercial)"
paid_business_customers_us: "~1 million active US business customers"
us_company_penetration: "~3% of all US companies"
global_business_market_share: "~45%"
fortune_500_presence: "~75% of Fortune 500"
mfa_with_yubikeys:
exact_stat_available: false
note: "Same data gap as Workspace — no published breakdown"
caveats:
- "Google's 3B user figure conflates consumer and business — not comparable to Microsoft's 270M commercial figure"
- "Market share figures vary by methodology (seats vs revenue vs orgs)"
- "Yubikey adoption % is an industry inference; treat as directional only"
- "Passkey != Yubikey — FIDO Alliance 87% figure covers all FIDO2/passkey methods"
I worked for Amazon they used the open source version of chrome os (chromium os). And mini PCs, I think this is the best setup, If I ever have to manage a company I will do this.
Wipe all data kind of seems like the best kind of cyberattack if you have backups. No data falling into wrong hands, no left behind rootkits, no ransome threats etc
> No data falling into wrong hands, no left behind rootkits, no ransome threats etc
You won't necessarily be able to know that the data hasn't already been exfiltrated and that the backups aren't post-compromise. Or that by restoring the backup you won't get back to the state that allowed them to get in in the first place.
Seems dire but hardly a supply chain disrupting attack. Stryker is a huge supplier but it not as if this will debilitate the medical supply chain completely.
Seems like the hackers found a door they could kick open easily and then justified the action ex-post.
If we take precedent from other times children in the USA were slaughtered in schools, probably a bit of national grandstanding on either end of the political spectrum then nothing actually material happening.
People routinely - well, at least every few months - shoot up US schools. They are radicalized online. There is a common pattern to the radicalization. However, it's ""forbidden"" to point that out or suggest restricting the supply of firearms to internal enemies of the US in any way.
Americans don't need any encouragement from foreign powers to do that. Congress has seen fit to keep letting it happen by pointing to ancient scripture about the right to develop one's own organized militia....
Difficult to be sure what would happen in a counter factual universe without foreign interference.
We do know that Russia et al sow division online as part of their anti western efforts, a strategy detailed in their "Foundations of Geopolitics" manual.
Someone commented, and I paraphrase poorly, "Imagine if Russia didn't influence the voters in 2016; all the racism and bigotry in the USA would disappear!"...
They'd probably go all in, kill the leader of the nation, kill some of the successors in line, bomb the daylights out of a bunch of civillian sites, wipe out a girls school, sink a few ships... oh wait.
Iran is a state sponsor of Islamic terrorist groups worldwide and have contributed to thousands of deaths, including children. None of it is justified but let's not pretend it's one sided.
there is one already, and you would know if you weren't a new account complaining about "What happened to this site" after a comment from a 20yo account.
Yes thank god the US was able to retaliate against the countries directly involved with 9/11...
Hypothetically, imagine if it ever comes out that one of our greatest allies was involved? I wonder what the reaction will be from Americans? The craziest is thing is that nothing would happen even if it were true
Yes, but Germany isn't the US. We do believe in the "rules-based international order", meaning that there will be a strongly worded letter, some discussion in the UN security council, ending in a veto by China or Russia. Followed by years of nothing at all, a memorial and yearly speeches at some day of rememberance.
West Germany's response to Palestinian terrorism was horrendous. But again, it's all about power. When Arabs have the most important resource in the world, you have little choice and have to submit.
Lately Germany improved by much and grew some spine.
But the internet in general is very leftist so they are all ok with giving Iran, Russia and China a free pass to do anything they want.
They are all oppressed by the evil west, you see. Read Marx or something they will say.
To be clear, I am Swedish. Yes we should have joined NATO sooner. We have helped USA with signalling spying since the 1950s, lookup the Catalina affair. As we should, by the way. Soviet and now Russia, is clearly our enemy. Russia aligns with China and Iran.
The US can't even confirm how many detainees have died in custody in immigration detention around the country, yet they have precise numbers on how many people the Iranian regime has killed? Give me a break.
If Iran is unwilling to let neutral international observers confirm the number, that suggests they are trying to hide a number they don't want the world to know.
Who gets to define what "neutral" is? According to the US, the International Criminal Court is not fit for this purpose. It certainly can't be a nation-state that's in a military alliance with the US.
Human Rights Watch, MSF, UNICEF? Woke grievance factories, the lot of them /s . World Health Organization? US just left it. It's slim pickings out there.
Which Iran did not do. There's a single report from an anti-Iran agency saying that Iran claimed 3,000 killed protesters (not 20k-30k). Iran never said that though, and I would challenge anyone to produce evidence that they did.
Medtech company males complete sense. Iran's strategy seems to be to tighten the screws on US citizens so they put pressure on the government to stop the war. They seem to be doing that with things like higher gas prices, and now delays at hospitals with this stryker hit
Makes sense given that US citizens tend not to be too supportive of american wars, but tolerate them because it doesnt really affect them. So iran can get this to affect them then people might come out to the streets. Which would be especially effective in a midterms year like now.
Man itll be ironic as fuck if iran manages to enact regime change in the us before the us does in iran
Meh. Americans showed in vietnam and iraq that they dont just go along with wars they think are bullshit
This could make americans hate iran and demand retribution, but i think its more likely to make americans made at israel and their own governmnet for dragging them into it for no reason
See, here is what I've observed. I don't expect to change your POVs. Nevertheless...
The issue started when Israel was ready to have recognition from Saudi Arabia on their statehood. This would make Hamas irrelevant. And puts Sunnis (Iran) lesser recognised. Meanwhile Shia's (Saudi) will become the defacto in the Muslim world and half of Muslim world would either tolerate or be OK with Israel. Hamas attack on Israel at Oct 7 stopped that. Hamas has been supported by Iran for a long time. So in the whole Gaza - Israel thing, Iran was backing Hamas. Then they proxied with them by providing assistance. Then they eventually directly got involved.
You need to understand, there was good period of peace between Israel & Palestine until Oct 7.
While I reject US toppling govts around the world, Iran's hand is not clean in this one. But also, US thought this would be as easy as Venezuela and killing Iran's leader will stop this. Interfering in other countries biz have consequences. And in this case, it's true for Iran & US.
>You need to understand, there was good period of peace between Israel & Palestine until Oct 7.
Yes, in the year before Oct 7. alone Israel army had only killed about 40 Palestinian children (34 alone between Jan and Nov 2022).
Not to mention Iran has been a target since 2001: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNt7s_Wed_4 - if not since 1953 (their 1979 changes being a response to the 1950s western invervention that installed a dictatorship), if not since forever:
Sure, if you consider Israel killing several hundred Palestinians each year and having a thousand hostages, sorry, "administrative detainees" indefinitely incarcerated without charge as they continued to colonize Palestinian land peaceful.
Mowing the lawn and stealing land in the west bank is what you call peace?
Israel even killed Irans negotiators last year when they were getting close to a deal. This situation is engineered, Netanyahu has wanted this for decades.
> You need to understand, there was good period of peace between Israel & Palestine until Oct 7.
What a disgusting and patronizing rewriting of history. This "peace" was enforced by ongoing occupation of Palestine and abuse of the people living there.
I have no idea why you would assume Israel had to resort to extortion to get Trump to help them bomb Iran. We bombed Venezuela a few weeks ago, no extortion required.
It's far more likely he was did it because Hegseth thought it would be more manly or something more ego driven than extortion. More likely it's just another example of flooding the zone to forget about the Epstein files and the stagnating economy
I've often struggled to find a concise way to say "control public narrative by crowding out other headlines". Thank you for sharing the popular term for this [0].
No problem! It's one of things that when you see it, you start to see it everywhere. The concept also has broad explanatory power: it explains seemingly irrational actions from otherwise shrewd actors such as Elon Musk spending so much on Twitter and a lot of Trump's smaller controversies
Venezuela is in the eastern hemisphere, just like Cuba, and it seems they want to control that entire part of the world. Iran would be of no concern to the US if not for Israel.
> Iran would be of no concern to the US if not for Israel.
This is only true if you completely ignore the Sunni Shia split and our relationship with literally every other country in the Middle East excluding Israel.
Edit:
This is evidenced by the fact that when Iran was attacked by The US and Israel, they bombed a bunch of neighboring countries with US bases. None of those countries have alliances with Israel. (Although they are certainly less hostile than other countries in the region)
I am thinking the theories are true because of the must larger negative repercussions of that action.
They are strengthening the regime (US intelligence services were aware of that before the attack and had informed the president), they are destabilizing all their oil producers, they are risking great economic cost..
It only makes sense if indeed they either extorted him, or if he is indeed demented / deranged.
Picking on someone vastly weaker than you (especially while they're already getting beat up by somebody else) doesn't make you look strong, it mostly just makes you look like an asshole, and probably an asshole who is too scared or too weak to go after somebody who can actually fight back.
This is true, but only for a certain percentage of the US population. Large swaths of this country think that picking on our weaker neighbors evidence of our strength
You make it sound as if Trump is some kind of rational actor who would never willingly put his hand on the stove.
Indeed every negative repercussion you have mentioned has already been previously inflicted on us without any extortion required.
> They are strengthening the regime
Us action in Venezuela has only strengthened the PSUV's grip on the country.
> they are destabilizing all their oil producers, they are risking great economic cost.
Liberation day. Need I say more?
This administration is quite willing to risk stability and the economy to assuage Trump's ego.
I mean he campaigned on stuff like "the so-called enemy doesn’t respect our country any longer." Blaming "Kamala Harris’ weakness" for this loss of respect. What else shows strength like literally blowing up your adversary?
They’ve been around for a while. Threat actors are something that I want our governments to be working on stopping. If they were capable, I would say we should run a government Project Zero but I doubt anyone would do long term service for $70k/yr when they could be making 10x-100x that.
Anyway, the bombings will have to continue till we rubble our enemies.
We had a government agency working on stopping threat actors, the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency, but then DOGE ruined it. Now it’s a shell.
'Drones from ships into California' is just a psi-op for manufacturing consent. This is not our first rodeo. By now, we should know how things work.
It's not in the strategic interest of Iran to do that, and they have been very strategic and rational. It's the Americans who have abandoned rationality. The Iranian goal is very clear: they don't want to sign an agreement and be attacked again in three months or one year.
In order to get that, they want a new security framework in its part of the world. They want Israel to suffer so its population think two times before doing this again. And they want to create enough economic pain to punish the current USA administration, again to teach a lesson.
Go beyond CNN or Fox News, listen to what the Iranians are saying (1).
> The Iranian goal is very clear: they don't want to sign an agreement and be attacked again in three months or one year.
Yes, of course they want to continue to do what they've been doing and not be attacked for that. Yet it is just not possible. Iran's current regime overall main goal is the spread of Islamic Revolution. Hezbollah, Hamas, Houthis - these are typical metastasis of that spread. Terrorist acts, highly visible ones, is one of the effective tools of such a spread, and that way the terrorist acts are rational in the minds of Iran's regime and their above mentioned metastatic followers. There is no security framework possible which would still allow such a spread.
There is little evidence of what you say. On the other hand, there is a country in the region that it's using any excuse that it find to expand itself to great cost to the civil population there.
Anyway, it's kind of funny that the USA have military posts more than 7000 miles away from its borders, but the danger of 'expansionism' is from Iran.
We are in a fantasy propaganda land where Iran is attacked in the middle of negotiations and is Iran the guilty party. How many people have to die in those USA wars? I mean, enough is enough.
>There is little evidence of what you say. ... but the danger of 'expansionism' is from Iran.
if you aren't familiar with Hezbollah, Hamas, Houthis - i highly recommend reading on it, even if just in Wikipedia.
>How many people have to die in those USA wars? I mean, enough is enough.
I think most important isn'h how many, the most important is who. Iran's regime has just indiscriminately killed 20-30K innocent civilians and uncountable many have been tortured. That is a crime against humanity. So, the top of Iran's regime and its IRGC has to be punished. I'm fine with that punishment being US and Israel's missiles.
> Iran's regime has just indiscriminately killed 20-30K innocent civilians and uncountable many have been tortured. That is a crime against humanity. So, the top of Iran's regime and its IRGC has to be punished. I'm fine with that punishment being US and Israel's missiles.
Israel's regime has killed twice that many in Gaza. Shouldn't they be prioritized for "punishment"?
As i said the key thing isn't how many, it is who, how and what for.
Israel started the war in response to the genocide of Oct 7. So all the legitimate collateral victims and damage from Israel's actions here is responsibility of the perpetrators of Oct 7.
You aren't calling for prosecution of the perpetrators of Oct 7. That is already shows your colors.
Anyway, the number of killed you cite comes directly from Hamas (its Ministry of Health stated those numbers to UN). Hamas is a terrorist org, and can't be trusted at all.
There is no evidence that Israel killed civilians in any meaningful numbers, and that the killings were criminal and not legitimate collateral.
Now, there is a million of cell phones in Gaza. After several years of watching Ukraine war anybody knows the amount of cell footage to expect. Some Russian killings in Bucha were recorded by reconnaissance drone for example. Russian soldiers posted videos of them executing POWs, security cameras recorded Russian soldiers marauding and so forth. Where is pretty much no footage comes from Gaza. "Israel soldiers shoot at the crowd at food distribution center" and nobody recorded anything (especially giving that according to Hamas it happens regularly - and still no footage!)
And on rare occasions when some footage comes out - the analysis in the example below shows that the basic laws of physics wouldn't let even 20 people to be killed when Hamas claimed 400-800 in that "bombing of hospital" (again, if you watch war footage, you'd know what gore of several people killed by explosion would look like, and no way the parking lot would look that way just the morning several hours later - where is all the blood for example? it is pretty obvious that the asphalt hadn't been washed by the time photo was made so blood should be there even if they picked up all the bodies and parts of it)
>Israel started the war in response to the genocide of Oct 7. So all the legitimate collateral victims and damage from Israel's actions here is responsibility of the perpetrators of Oct 7.
>You aren't calling for prosecution of the perpetrators of Oct 7. That is already shows your colors.
The world did not start on October 7th, and it's completely disingenuous to suggest otherwise, which shows YOUR colors. I could equally state " all responsibility lies with the perpetrators of the Nakhba".
>Anyway, the number of killed you cite comes directly from Hamas (its Ministry of Health stated those numbers to UN). Hamas is a terrorist org, and can't be trusted at all.
If the number can't be trusted, why is the IDF acknowledging it?
> There is no evidence that Israel killed civilians in any meaningful numbers, and that the killings were criminal and not legitimate collateral.
If this is your position no further discussion is needed. There is nothing meaningful to be gained from engaging with you. I don't know if you guys realize how insane you appear to every other human being on the planet when you try to gaslight us into thinking the piles of evidence of dead women and children either doesn't exist or is somehow accidental.
Why was Hezbollah created? From wikipedia: "Hezbollah was founded in 1982 by Lebanese clerics in response to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon"
Why was Hamas created? From wikipedia: "was founded by Palestinian Islamic scholar Ahmed Yassin in 1987 after the outbreak of the First Intifada against the Israeli occupation"
What about the Houthis? From wikipedia: "The formation of the Houthi organisations has been described by Adam Baron of the European Council on Foreign Relations as a reaction to foreign intervention."
But sure, the problem is Iran.
There is not evidence about that 20-30k civilians dead. I could say it was 3 and I would have the same proof that you have.
This rationale of 'Iran is not democratic enough' (despise they have a constitution, a parliament and elections) but I will support Saudi Arabia (that light of human rights in the middle east) is nonsense.
All this is done for the geopolitical interest of USA, the oil and Israel. Anyone that say otherwise is taking us for idiots.
"The government of Iran's reformist President Masud Pezeshkian has published the names and national ID numbers of 2,985 individuals killed during recent nationwide protests."
Sounds like justification for a false flag operation by the US government. How would they transport these massive things and launch them on a different continent? That, or the US is trying to justify that this illegal war is on their doorstep and need to expand their terror.
"Reichstag fire" attempts are definitively a legitimate concern. But as Ukraine has demonstrated, all you need to get a drone army deep into a country attacking you is a regular shipping container.
The drones Iran are using are actually relatively small, you can fit 5 of them into a medium sized truck and they can launch in-situ, which is how they've been using them in ground operations. Doesn't seem that much of a stretch to put a bunch of them into shipping containers.
surely a New York Post article quoting a Fox News "expert" will be factual, unbiased and not at all an attempt to pour more oil into the fire and manufacture consent to bomb a couple more girl's schools.
I feel like that's not realistic, why would they launch drones to California rather than some place like DC or NY. It's a long distance.
I don't even think they'd launch drones to DC either, they seem to be all in on attacking oil infrastructure as well as us bases & defense systems in the Middle East, rather than America.
>why would they launch drones to California rather than some place like DC or NY. It's a long distance.
Because they allegedly have a ship already in the Pacific loaded with drones.
DC and NY are way too far from Iran to launch any kind of attack; the only attack they can possibly do is from a ship, and ships can be anyplace where there's deep enough water.
We never did find out what those drones in New Jersey in 2024 were, did we? One Republican congressman seemed convinced at the time that he'd been informed:
BBC: Mystery New Jersey drones not from Iranian 'mothership' - Pentagon
They were flying over military installations, if they were anyone else's drones, they would have been shot down like the weather balloons that spook the government from time to time.
> Iran plans to launch drones from ships into California
That does not make any sense to me. Does Iran have a bunch of ships in the Pacific? Why? How would they even got close enough to the US coast without being noticed at this point?
I'm not saying it's not true, I just don't understand.
I’ve been seeing stuff saying China is a big customer of Iranian oil, so maybe there are oil tankers heading to China from Iran. No idea if that is actually the case though. I wonder if that Flexport shipping map that was shared here recently has any info?
Yeah that makes no sense. only thing I've heard is they have connections to some cartels in south america. venezuela is gone but I suppose they could hire some local talent and get close enough?
Seems like a really dumb idea right now, unless maybe as a last resort if Trump decides to drop tactical nukes or something
Yes, exactly. In the realpolitik of organizational IT security, there's less of an emphasis on making systems more resilient to attack, much more of an emphasis on having an audit trail, so that in case the company is sued over a data breach they can claim "we did the very best that could be reasonably expected of us with the knowledge we had at the time" and provide receipts to back up that claim. Implicit in that claim is also "we used the same tools that everyone else is using so you can't blame us specially for unwittingly choosing something vulnerable to compromise". Hence the proliferation of shitty single-point-of-failure "endpoint security" software that leads to events like the 2024 Clownstrike incident.
> Nuclear weapons are a MAD red line that will result in total annihilation of the attacker. They are only useful in a defensive capacity.
Also in a "if I'm going down, everyone else is going down with me", which is Ian's strategy in this war (for good reasons). If the IRGC had nukes, and was severely threatened (like, killing the Supreme Leader and threatening to kill all of the replacements until they bend to the US/Israel will), they might have decided to go out "with style".
Yes, but the whole point of having nukes as a deterrent is that the US wouldn't have arbitrarily killed their leader in the first place. "If i'm going down, everyone else is going down" is the feature, not a bug.
To be clear I don't like the idea of MAD one bit. But this is indeed how it's meant to work.
Nothing geopolitical about it in the sense I intended, except as a reference to the Vietnam-era catchphrase. It's simply a case of "putting spyware on everybody's corporate PC for security is like fucking for virginity".
Isn't it a weird coincidence that soon after the US and Israel started an unprovoked and unnecessary war (that billionaires will profit handsomely from, as an aside) that we get stories like this to manufacture consent?
I belive that US tech firms have increasingly become valid military targets. There was a post about this yesterday [1]. BUT I don't think that extends to hospitals and medical supplies, regardless of who owns them or if they treat soldiers or not.
But, as best as I can tell, the company has been inconvenienced, possibly massively. Let's put this in context. The US launched a Tomahawk missile at a school and killed 160 school girls.
And I bet that if you look into pretty much any company hit by a hack, you'll find cost-cutting on IT to increase executive pay and bonuses.
Between the Iran-Iraq war, which the US was responsible for, and decades of sanctions, the US has by this point killed millions of Iranians. The real problem here is the general ignorance of the average American of America's 70+ years of war crimes against Iran [2].
I mean this as analysis, not justification. But at some point the incredulity at blowback rings hollow.
If you make justifications for non-military targets like that ("tech firms"), then it just becomes a matter of opinion on where we draw the line. _You_ don't think that extends to hospitals and medical supplies, but _they_ might, and you're moral compass is just as righteous as theirs.
There was a time when there was less restraint with what prosecuting a war looked like. The Mongols famously wiped out the Khwarazmian Empire after the Sultan killed their traders.
But given the growth in destructive power, particularly with the advent of the nuclear age, it became necessary to establish some rules or norms for war and I'm referring specifically to the Geneva Conventions [1]. Conventions here cover that wounded people and civilians aren't military targets. So it's not my opinion or Iran's opinion that matters.
The question then is do we live in an interntional rules-based order or not? The US and Israel have ignored the rules-based order in favor of "might is right" politics.
As for tech firms, I'm sorry but a company like Palantir has made itself a valid military target [2][3]. And if you work there, you are really no different from the Reaper Drone pilot who fires Hellfire missiles at, say, a wedding procession [4].
> I belive that US tech firms have increasingly become valid military targets.
Not just US tech firms. So-called dual-use has been embedded into all kinds of what was previously exclusively civilian infrastructure including telecoms networks and data centres.
Of course dual-use has always been a thing up to a point, but there has been a shift in recent years to bring it right to the heart of military doctrine.
For example the UK's Strategic Defence Review 2025 and the new Defence Industrial Strategy:
"A new £11bn ‘Invest’ annual budget has also been established under the NAD. This will fund kit for our front-line forces which is affordable and grows our UK industrial base. Our new partnership with industry and a decade of consistently rising defence spending will encourage more private finance to grow our world-leading scale-up and dual-use tech companies."
"Today, much of the best innovation is found in the private sector, while the increasing prevalence of dual-use technologies has widened the net of potential suppliers that can contribute to Defence outcomes."
The way things are going it won't just be tech firms that will be considered 'legitimate targets'.
Is there a reason to believe this is false flag per your first sentence? Iran is an advanced technological civilization and very much capable. They would be considered a first world western like nation if they didn’t have a repressive theocracy.
>Isn't it a weird coincidence that soon after the US and Israel started an unprovoked and unnecessary war (that billionaires will profit handsomely from, as an aside) that we get stories like this to manufacture consent?
Are you suggesting that's an inside job and/or false flag attack? If it's not a false flag attack, why imply that the reporting must be to "manufacture consent"? Shouldn't you expect major hacks to be reported?
I'm saying that the media suddenly covering stories like this isn't a coincidence. The media is a tool of the state to manufacture consent. Media literacy goes beyond just looking at the facts in a story. It's also what's not mentioned, how is it presented, what stories are written, what stories aren't and, most importantly, why.
All social media companies manufacture consent for American foreign policy. Pretty much all American media does the same.
I find all this particularly funny because our media does the exact thing we accuse the likes of Chinese media doing it. We just pretend it doesn't happen here or are oblivious to it.
>I'm saying that the media suddenly covering stories like this isn't a coincidence. The media is a tool of the state to manufacture consent [...]
What do you mean "suddenly"? Per the reddit thread, they just got hacked yesterday. It's not like they were sitting on the story until the war broke out. Moreover I see hacks covered in the media all the time, even if there's no obvious russia/iran/north korea "manufacture consent" angle.
>Media literacy goes beyond just looking at the facts in a story. It's also what's not mentioned, how is it presented, what stories are written, what stories aren't and, most importantly, why.
There's a huge gulf between "taking every story at face value" and what you're doing which is seemingly assuming every story must be part of some sinister conspiracy to "manufacture consent".
> Per the reddit thread, they just got hacked yesterday.
There are constant hacks of companies. Most of them don't get covered. So there's that. But it's also how it's framed. It's an "Iranian cyberattack". Interesting.
Couldn't an equally valid headline be "Lax security results in Stryker getting hacked"? Probably (just guessing).
It's a bit like all the stories about the Chinese stealing IP and jobs. Ok, let's assume those claims are true and have been for decades. So why do companies keep offshoring there knowing this will happen? At what point do you blame short-term cost-cutting by bonus-hunting executives?
My point is that the media is playing along and you're going to get a lot of "Iran = bad" stories because of it.
>There are constant hacks of companies. Most of them don't get covered. So there's that.
Source? You can't just be like "some hacks don't get covered, this hack got covered, therefore there must be some ulterior motive behind this". If the baseline rate for reporting hacks is like 50% (random number), then the fact that it got reported doesn't tell us much. Moreover Stryker Corporation is a S&P 500 company, and this hack had major impact on their business. It's not just some data that got leaked, all their laptops/phones got wiped. It's exactly the type of hack that I'd expect to not get swept under the rug.
>It's an "Iranian cyberattack". Interesting.
Again, unless you're going for the false flag or inside job excuse, the hacker's note makes it pretty clear that it's Iranian backed, or at least by Iranian sympathizers.
>Couldn't an equally valid headline be "Lax security results in Stryker getting hacked"? Probably (just guessing).
>It's a bit like all the stories about the Chinese stealing IP and jobs. Ok, let's assume those claims are true and have been for decades. So why do companies keep offshoring there knowing this will happen? At what point do you blame short-term cost-cutting by bonus-hunting executives?
Same reason we don't put out headlines saying "women going to seedy club results in rape".
> Isn't it a weird coincidence that soon after the US and Israel started an unprovoked and unnecessary war (that billionaires will profit handsomely from, as an aside) that we get stories like this to manufacture consent?
Manufacture consent for what? Starting a war with Iran? The US already did that, and didn't need any sort of consent.
If anything, this sort of story is more likely to manufacture opposition to the war, because folks already think the war is stupid, pointless, and never should have happened, and now they're suffering more for it.
Please stop with the '35k', you have no idea where that number comes from, it's not even good propaganda anymore. OSINT groups say 15k, human rights activists said they confirmed 7000 death (6400 protesters) and have 11k more to investigate so at most it's 18k.
Iran executed 1500 people in 2025, and usually execute between 50 and 500 every year. They arrested 50 000 protesters, a huge part of which will be put to death. You can say a lot against the Mollahs, and you'd be right , they're horrible but please don't lie, it makes the argument weaker, and seems like slopaganda.
Still, Saddam Hussein chemical bombs donated by the US killed way more Iranians than the regime killed over 50 years, so I think the 'just war' propaganda need to stop. Saudis killed at least 53k slaves over the past 10 years, and ordered some of those executed by their police, I don't see anybody in the US taking down the regime.
> I do believe President Trump stated it was an Iranian Tomahawk missile.
If Trump said that, it is propaganda aimed at the amazingly ignorant; Tomahawks are US-made and only used by the US, UK, and Australia, with the Netherlands and Japan having recently entered into agreements to deploy them.
But the coalition (is two nations really a coalition?) hasn't state regime change is the purpose of the war. Well, they did, and then changed their minds. Several times.
And, as I'm sure you're aware, knocking off the head of state in Iran doesn't necessarily move the needle on regime change. Dismantling the IRGC and removing the hardliners will be a long, dangerous operation and I doubt the US has the stomach for that. And Israel has already moved on to bombing Lebanon again.
What are the US politic for regime changing another Middle Eastern country, one that's bigger than Iraq? Is there a coherent US plan for this war? I have yet to hear one.
And? The statement was pretty clear they think current Iranian regime should go but no indication of what comes behind it which is ultimate question. Their status as Iranian does not get them off the hook of answering "Regime change, how and what will next regime look like?"
I am asking Iranians what’s next. It’s always the most important question. There will be some other guys with weapons taking over. Or should we expect peaceful elections coming like it was in Germany after defeating Nazis? But wait, Germany was conquered and divided by Allies to make it happen.
They were explaining US politics, not Middle East politics. Whether or not you see a first-world project to liberate Iran as legitimate, fundamentally the Trump government is too mercurial to see it through.
While the Bush-era invasion of Iraq was indefensible (if it was defensible they wouldn't have needed to push the WMD lie to justify it) and their initial projections were as ridiculously optimistic as the Trump government's, the Bush crew were clearly ideologically committed to the project and willing to see it through to the end.
Trump's people are not. This is "move fast and break things" and "strong opinions weakly held" in geopolitical form.
I'm afraid the coalition has no idea what to do with the islamic regime in question. Unless it will be toppled from inside, the best the coalition can offer is more bombs (until it becomes too much of a strain for the budget).
Idk, this didn't happen in Iran. Literally not a single bit of evidence to prove these claims of violence of the state of Iran against its citizens.. Your consent has been completely manufactured. You people are trying to wash the sins of the genocide you just committed on the people of Gaza by creating a fake one in Iran, to justify your thirst for blood.
While I'm sure that it did happen, it certainly wasn't 30k people. There's tons of videos of provocateurs shooting shotguns at police... What happens anywhere in the world when you start shooting at police?
But in the case of Israel, land of the religious ethno-state that has been literally committing acts of terror for 3 years straight in 4k, on video.. they were allowed continue governing themselves after killing or wounding 30k innocent children...
So, if you want your argument stronger: 7k deaths confirmed, 6400 protesters, 200 regime officers, and 400 bystanders.
Plus 11k unconfirmed dead, according to HRANA, so at most 18k dead during the Iranian protests. They also jailed 50k people, and before the war, it seemed a third of those were destined to be executed if the trend continued.
Iran also execute between 50 and 500 people a year, every year, and in the last 5, it was closer to 500, culminating in 2025 where 1500 person got the death penalty.
A regime that has to kill that much is weak, and would probably have fallen on itself if the US hadn't launched any strikes.
There's an awful lot more involved on both sides of this. I don't think Iran gets enough criticism from the "non-rightwing" faction for its role in both supplying Russia with weapons against Ukraine and for escalating the conflict around Israel resulting in reprisals against Palenstinian and Lebanese civilians.
It would take some unpleasant searching but I'm sure one can find the most recent incident of Hezbollah (not Hamas, Hezbollah are explicitly backed by Iran) either carrying out a missile or suicide bombing attach with the loss of Israeli civilian lives.
(disclaimer: the war of aggression against Iran by Israel and its decapitation attacks are also wrong)
I absolutely think there should be ramifications for such acts.
What I find bizarre, is that China and Russia do this daily, and "oh well". If such states sent over people to, you know, do damage using a bomb instead of a hack, there'd be trouble. As in, two towers were damaged, and it set off 20 years of war ... mostly against the wrong states.
Yet if you cause death via subtle means, such as reducing hospital infra, or attack and destroy infra via hacking, meh. Oh well!
This sort of falls inline with all other compute issues that appear before all elected bodies on the planet. An immense lack of understanding and comprehension, coupled with an inability to act.
And one wonders why Iran wants a nuke. It's not to wipe out Israel and the US as some hawks in Congress falsely claim. It's the same reason North Korea developed nukes. Terrible regimes, but they understand countries with nukes don't get bombed or invaded. That's Ukraine's tragedy.
yeah, if there's one clear takeaway from the US-involved conflicts of the past several decades, it's that nukes are the key to making the U.S. keep its hands to itself
Ramifications include firing more security engineers and replacing them with shoddy AI tools, pencil whipping any issues that cost time and money to fix immediately, or just ignoring the problem entirely until it happens a few more times.
A problem with this line of reasoning is that the people killed by your hypothetical bombs are likely not the ones responsible for the previous attack, even if they do live in the same country. Warfare is in general a very poor system of justice and probably shouldn't be considered as such.
The only reason the US government doesn't make a big deal about hacking is because they dont want blowback from their own intelligence collection operations.
It's like how every country knows embassies are full of spies but they let them operate as diplomats anyway because they do the same thing.
What a ridiculous comparison. This Iranian regime is responsible for the direct deaths of civilians, on purpose, due to both funding and direct acts of violence around the world. And yes, that includes countless children.
Not to mention its own citizens, Iranian death squads, killing of women, there is literally no comparison between the purposeful, lack of any care or concern for life exhibited by Iran, and a literal accident with a missile.
To highlight that point, the US cares enough to investigate and discover just how such an unfortunate act happened.
I'm not quite getting your point. Are you saying that when Iran kills children, we should get angry and bomb them, and when the US kills children, other countries shouldn't get angry and bomb the US?
There absolutely is a comparison. Both acts are evil. Just because Iran's regime has a history of even more heinous evil acts doesn't absolve the United States and Israel of their own evil acts.
So, since the Iranian regime killed protesters, it's OK for the US regime to obliterate a girl's school? And then lie about it? I'm having trouble following your reasoning.
Tell me again why was this war necessary for the US? What sort of threat did Iran pose? Wasn't their nuclear program "obliterated" when we bombed them last year? Every time someone from the Trump administration talks, it's a different reason.
The commenter you replied to seems to be oblivious to the fact that this act, described in the article, is merely a consequence of the war they started.
Iranian hackers have been at place for quite some time beforehand.
And it's not a war started, its a "war" responding to decades of heinous, vicious, deadly funding of terrorist organizations, and bombing of innocent civilians.
Defending Iran is akin to defending a serial murderer. Or complaining that the serial murdered got shot while resisting arrest. Ridiculous.
I sincerely hope the decent people of Iran do get rid of this ridiculous, religiously ran and controlled state.
The US killed many, many more civilians accross the world that Iran ever did. Yet you don't seem to care about that, why?
> And it's not a war started, its a "war" responding to decades of heinous, vicious, deadly funding of terrorist organizations, and bombing of innocent civilians.
As if the US hadn't been antagonizing Iran for decades. Trump broke the nuclear agreements (which Iran had been following), then refused to negotiate new ones, then joined Israel in their bloodlust for muslim blood. This war is aimless, and only serves to radicalize the Iranian people against Israel and the US. Which will inevitably result in even more bloodshed down the line.
> Trump broke the nuclear agreements (which Iran had been following), then refused to negotiate new ones
This is the most head-slapping part of this whole situation. We had a nuclear deal and he pulled the US out of it for no good reason (my read: because he just hates Obama that much that anything he did he wanted to undo). This situation is 100% on this president.
I don't see why this matters, there are accidental civilian casualties in every war. This was unintentional, unlike Iran killing 30,000 of their own citizens, which was entirely deliberate.
If you can find evidence the United States directly targeted a school with the intent of killing children and not just due to outdated intel (and somebody setting up a school in what was once part of an Iranian Revolutionary Guard naval base), maybe I'd change my mind.
30000 is nothing compared to the civilians the US has killed all over the world, all "accidentally" of course. Since 2023 Israel has killed 57000 civilians in Gaza. Shouldn't you be calling for an invasion of Israel on humanitarian grounds then?
> If such states sent over people to, you know, do damage using a bomb instead of a hack, there'd be trouble.
Russia have been running assassinations and sabotage programme using poison, bombs, small arms and radioactive material in the West for years with no real repercussions.
I didn't downvote you, but you probably were because your comment is an impertinent strawman. The faces of your downvoters are normal people who care about the quality of the discussion.
They are trying to hurt innocents in retaliation for the US murdering their children. I understand the sentiment, but strongly disagree with acting on it. Ukraine has done a much better (of course not perfect) job of retaliating against military targets in response to russian war crimes.
I'm sure that if Iran had the backing of the Western world, and had their surplus of armaments funneled it's way, it would be bombing army bases and refineries and airfields and factories and port facilities in the US.
Unlike Ukraine, it does not, so it seems to be focusing on cyber vandalism and blowing up oil infrastructure in US vassal states, and other low-cost, high-ROI activities.
That’s not the motivation for these attacks at all. They’re waging asymmetric warfare against a much larger and more exposed opponent.
Their goal is to make it too troublesome for the US/Israel to continue attacking them, like a swarm of bees attacking a bear to keep it away from their honey.
Iran is in it to win it and the US is so very obviously not.
The question is if the pressure that Israel can put on the current administration greater than the pressure that Iran can put on America as a whole.
Trump and republicans are now all-in in this war and this administration can tolerate a huge amount of chaos if it allows them to keep winning. It doesn't matter wether Israel pressures the administration or not. I'm not confident that the regime will fall but I am confident that it will be put in its place internationally even if it means closing the iranian borders from the outside indefinitely. BTW the US and Israel are not alone in this war.
Trump is never all in on anything. There's a reason that "TACO" became a meme. This administration is much more likely to lose interest and declare victory while oil facilities in the gulf states are still on fire.
> closing the iranian borders from the outside indefinitely
Are you proposing to disrupt China-Iran shipping? Intercept even Chinese-flagged oil vessels? (not that there are many, most are still under flags of convenience)
>There's a reason that "TACO" became a meme. This administration is much more likely to lose interest and declare victory while oil facilities in the gulf states are still on fire.
Do you think Trump's going to lose interest and declare victory while bombs are still flying over Bibi's head?
IT systems around the country say that they have no access to your personal data and there they can only block access to Intune apps.
But the linked reddit thread[1] in this article notes personal devices getting wiped and locked out.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/cybersecurity/comments/1rqopq0/stry...
Beyond that there are so many other things in intune you can use to prevent this sort of thing. Short lived / JIT credentials with MFA, ip restrictions, multi admin approval, rbac (role based fine tuned permissions eg help desk can't wipe, only retire ) etc. sounds like there were some big misses here.
Also sounds like they were in the system long enough to exfiltrate 50+ TB of data without setting off alarm bells.
iOS at least displays a very clear warning when you import the profile telling you exactly what it can do.
Not that this isn't awful, but it's good to be clear on what this can do when used within normal expectations.
If a wiper actually hit internal systems, the bigger concern isn’t consumer data but disruption to manufacturing, logistics, and hospital support. That kind of outage could ripple through a lot of hospitals pretty quickly.
If Stryker stays down, supplies of some things will run out soon and many people will find themselves without medical procedures available.
So the options here are MDM or no MDM and that’s a hard choice. No MDM means that you have to trust all people to get things as basic as FDE or a sane password policy right. No option to wipe or lock lost devices. No option to unlock devices where people forgot their password. Using an MDM means having a privileged attack vector into all machines.
Do not use global admin or admin account as daily driver for one. Dont save it in browser etc either.
Limit roles, even within the application, here Intune.
Office 365 also has conditional access and many policy leavers to tweak, many cases of people locking themselves OUT of 365. So the gates work but you need to configure them.
"Break glass" global admin accounts now also require MFA. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/entra/identity/authenticat...
For Stryker specifically? We don't and probably won't know details.
For companies in general? Background checks, security clearance etc are done if the company determines this necessary and are willing to pay for the process and higher salary.
Gsuite + Slack I guess. lmao. As if that is better.
Looking forward to your reply.
Previous place had a corporate controlled windows laptop that made a very poor thin client for accessing dev machines. One before that had a somewhat centrally managed macbook that made a very poor thin client for accessing dev machines.
You don't have to soul bond to Microsoft to get things done.
- Ensure the Linux machines are up-to-date and users are not just indefinitely postponing OS updates?
- Same as above but with programs/software
- How do you ensure correct settings configuration in terms of security? Say default browser, extensions, program access etc?
- Re-image or reinstall the OS when there are issues or PC handover to another employee? Manually with a USB stick?
This kind of control exists and is needed for Linux and MacOS too. RMM is not a Windows only thing...
The critics here see Intune but what if they used another RMM and they compromised another cloud RMM account? Same issue.
A lot of corporate stuff seems to be much worse than even a random vibe coded web app. I have to book holiday through something called "HR Connect", watching pages load laboriously and redirect every login through several very long URLs. Slowly.
Yes, many corporate websites are bad. Like ERP or HR systems. None of that has to do with device management, RMMs/MDMs or Intune.
In that world, there is no central IT team pushing changes to machines and arguing with developers about whether they really need to be able to run a debugger.
I don't know how to keep windows machines alive. It's probably harder.
- Ensure the machines are up-to-date and users are not just indefinitely postponing OS updates?
- Same as above but with programs/software
- How do you ensure correct settings configuration in terms of security? Say default browser, extensions, program access etc?
- Re-image or reinstall the OS when there are issues or PC handover to another employee? Manually with a USB stick?
This kind of control exists and is needed for Linux and MacOS too. RMM is not a Windows only thing...
The critics here see Intune but what if they used another RMM and they compromised another cloud RMM account? Same issue.
Also, here there is no "arguing". They order the software from our portal and it gets pushed into Company Portal via Intune...
Write down a list you say... idk what to say. You have only worked for small startups I gather? Nothing wrong with that but please recognize that these types of limits and programs are not deployed for fun or to ruin your day.
At a bare minimum, your backup systems should have a completely disjoint set of credentials to your main systems, stored and controlled differently, ideally by a seperate team, if you have the resources.
(And the arguing becomes a problem when IT ceases to consider their job to be solving problems for users within some constraints, and just starts to consider their job to be enforcing those constraints. This also mixes badly with incompetence, which tends to turn everything into a tedious tick-box exercise that neither improves security nor solves user's problems. It's not a good time to have an IT department that can't resist any new security checkbox a vendor offers but can't figure out how to work any of their fancy tools to make life even the slightest bit smoother for their users)
That works for a 5 person company but not a 1000 person company. Or a 10 person company with 1000 machines.
Because in the end, it’s not IT on the line for their odious policies causing late delivery, it was us.
Also, if the company is certified in some way there are audits for these things, you understand? Such as updates, backups, security, PAM, antivirus etc :)
Subvert these controls intentionally, especially security ones = bye bye. Logs don't lie. We see you.
And to be clear, SCCM and Intune is a gun.
MS will not stop you from blowing your foot off with the gun.
Remember https://www.itprotoday.com/windows-7/aggressive-configmgr-ba... ?
>During TechEd 2014, Emory University's IT department prepared and deployed Windows 7 upgrades to the campuses computers. If you've worked with ConfigMgr at all, you know that there are checks-and-balances that can be employed to ensure that only specifically targeted systems will receive an OS upgrade. In Emory University's case, the check-and-balance method failed and instead of delivering the upgrade to applicable computers, delivered Windows 7 to ALL computers including laptops, desktops, and even servers.
Things are just getting started.
This is an extremely bold lie. There have been many uprisings by Iranians against their horrible government that are extremely brutally suppressed by said government.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/world/589307/iran-police-chief-sa...
Iranian protesters will be treated as enemies if they support Tehran's foes, the country's top police officer warned, as the Middle East war sparked fears mass anti-government rallies could reignite.
"If anyone comes forward in line with the wishes of the enemy, we will no longer see them as merely a protester, we will see them as an enemy," said national police chief Ahmad-Reza Radan in comments aired by state broadcaster IRIB late on Tuesday.
"And we will do to them what we do to an enemy. We will deal with them in the same way we deal with enemies," he added.
"All our forces are also ready, with their hands on the trigger, prepared to defend their revolution."
His warning comes after the government cracked down on anti-government protests in January, sparked a month before over economic grievances in the sanctions-hit country.
The authorities deemed the protests to be "riots" and Radan at one point issued an ultimatum to protesters to hand themselves in or face the full force of the law.
Iranian authorities acknowledge more than 3000 deaths in the unrest, including members of the security forces and bystanders, but say the violence was caused by "terrorist acts" fuelled by Iran's enemies.
The US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA), however, has recorded more than 7,000 killings in the crackdown, the vast majority protesters, though the toll may be far higher. More than 50,000 have been arrested, it says.
US President Donald Trump had initially cheered on the protesters, threatening to intervene on their behalf as authorities launched a deadly crackdown, but his threats soon shifted to Iran's nuclear programme.
Washington launched strikes with Israel on Iran on February 28, sparking retaliatory strikes by Tehran against Israel and US bases across the Gulf region.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/world/589307/iran-police-chief-sa...
An important book to read.
So many people think this started with the islamic revolution of the 70s. The meddling goes further in time.
I guess they have some sensitive data on our emergency services organizations and their headquarters addresses and accounts payable people, maybe PII on signatories (officers, board members & “important people”) and whatnot.
Anyone know if it would be worse?
they have a tremendous catalog[0].
spend time in a hospital, dental office, rehab, etc and you'll see the logo plastered across everything.
[0]: https://www.stryker.com/us/en/portfolios/medical-surgical-eq...
heart rate monitors that go down and no one can get support for, cannot get replacement CAT scan equipment, etc.
People's AICDs aren't going to start exploding, but I'm pretty confident this will hamper care for many patients.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/account-billing/download...
MFA in general had to be forced on companies, and then it is most often in software on a phone.
Here are some rough numbers.
Does anyone know if this is correct?
[0] https://www.android.com/enterprise/work-profile/
Wipe all data kind of seems like the best kind of cyberattack if you have backups. No data falling into wrong hands, no left behind rootkits, no ransome threats etc
You won't necessarily be able to know that the data hasn't already been exfiltrated and that the backups aren't post-compromise. Or that by restoring the backup you won't get back to the state that allowed them to get in in the first place.
We do know that Russia et al sow division online as part of their anti western efforts, a strategy detailed in their "Foundations of Geopolitics" manual.
Iran is a state sponsor of Islamic terrorist groups worldwide and have contributed to thousands of deaths, including children. None of it is justified but let's not pretend it's one sided.
there is one already, and you would know if you weren't a new account complaining about "What happened to this site" after a comment from a 20yo account.
Do you understand?
The account may be newer, but I am not, I assure you. If you want to go into personal attacks we can.
We in Sweden have had Islamist terror attacks plenty already. By supporting Iran you are sponsoring terror.
The Iranian regime just tried to murder a Swedish-Iranian:
https://www.tv4.se/artikel/7my3ReE6WsRs4GnFxj216U/uppgifter-...
USA embassy in Norway bombed by IDE
https://www.reuters.com/world/norway-police-apprehend-three-...
End of discussion.
Only in Argentina you get such an attack with no group taking responsibility. Justice system in Argentina is corrupt as hell.
Hypothetically, imagine if it ever comes out that one of our greatest allies was involved? I wonder what the reaction will be from Americans? The craziest is thing is that nothing would happen even if it were true
I'm not sure if this is any better.
But the internet in general is very leftist so they are all ok with giving Iran, Russia and China a free pass to do anything they want.
They are all oppressed by the evil west, you see. Read Marx or something they will say.
To be clear, I am Swedish. Yes we should have joined NATO sooner. We have helped USA with signalling spying since the 1950s, lookup the Catalina affair. As we should, by the way. Soviet and now Russia, is clearly our enemy. Russia aligns with China and Iran.
Yes, yes orange man bad.
Human Rights Watch, MSF, UNICEF? Woke grievance factories, the lot of them /s . World Health Organization? US just left it. It's slim pickings out there.
It seems a really weird target for Iran otherwise.
Makes sense given that US citizens tend not to be too supportive of american wars, but tolerate them because it doesnt really affect them. So iran can get this to affect them then people might come out to the streets. Which would be especially effective in a midterms year like now.
Man itll be ironic as fuck if iran manages to enact regime change in the us before the us does in iran
This could make americans hate iran and demand retribution, but i think its more likely to make americans made at israel and their own governmnet for dragging them into it for no reason
The issue started when Israel was ready to have recognition from Saudi Arabia on their statehood. This would make Hamas irrelevant. And puts Sunnis (Iran) lesser recognised. Meanwhile Shia's (Saudi) will become the defacto in the Muslim world and half of Muslim world would either tolerate or be OK with Israel. Hamas attack on Israel at Oct 7 stopped that. Hamas has been supported by Iran for a long time. So in the whole Gaza - Israel thing, Iran was backing Hamas. Then they proxied with them by providing assistance. Then they eventually directly got involved.
You need to understand, there was good period of peace between Israel & Palestine until Oct 7.
While I reject US toppling govts around the world, Iran's hand is not clean in this one. But also, US thought this would be as easy as Venezuela and killing Iran's leader will stop this. Interfering in other countries biz have consequences. And in this case, it's true for Iran & US.
Yes, in the year before Oct 7. alone Israel army had only killed about 40 Palestinian children (34 alone between Jan and Nov 2022).
Not to mention Iran has been a target since 2001: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNt7s_Wed_4 - if not since 1953 (their 1979 changes being a response to the 1950s western invervention that installed a dictatorship), if not since forever:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Game
These are reversed
Israel even killed Irans negotiators last year when they were getting close to a deal. This situation is engineered, Netanyahu has wanted this for decades.
What a disgusting and patronizing rewriting of history. This "peace" was enforced by ongoing occupation of Palestine and abuse of the people living there.
It's far more likely he was did it because Hegseth thought it would be more manly or something more ego driven than extortion. More likely it's just another example of flooding the zone to forget about the Epstein files and the stagnating economy
I've often struggled to find a concise way to say "control public narrative by crowding out other headlines". Thank you for sharing the popular term for this [0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_the_zone
This is only true if you completely ignore the Sunni Shia split and our relationship with literally every other country in the Middle East excluding Israel.
Edit: This is evidenced by the fact that when Iran was attacked by The US and Israel, they bombed a bunch of neighboring countries with US bases. None of those countries have alliances with Israel. (Although they are certainly less hostile than other countries in the region)
They are strengthening the regime (US intelligence services were aware of that before the attack and had informed the president), they are destabilizing all their oil producers, they are risking great economic cost..
It only makes sense if indeed they either extorted him, or if he is indeed demented / deranged.
This is true, but only for a certain percentage of the US population. Large swaths of this country think that picking on our weaker neighbors evidence of our strength
Indeed every negative repercussion you have mentioned has already been previously inflicted on us without any extortion required.
> They are strengthening the regime
Us action in Venezuela has only strengthened the PSUV's grip on the country.
> they are destabilizing all their oil producers, they are risking great economic cost.
Liberation day. Need I say more?
This administration is quite willing to risk stability and the economy to assuage Trump's ego.
I mean he campaigned on stuff like "the so-called enemy doesn’t respect our country any longer." Blaming "Kamala Harris’ weakness" for this loss of respect. What else shows strength like literally blowing up your adversary?
Anyway, the bombings will have to continue till we rubble our enemies.
Iran warns U.S. tech firms could become targets as war expands
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47341007
https://www.10news.com/news/local-news/authorities-warn-of-p...
Fox News drone expert:
https://nypost.com/2026/03/11/us-news/iran-could-use-drones-...
It's not in the strategic interest of Iran to do that, and they have been very strategic and rational. It's the Americans who have abandoned rationality. The Iranian goal is very clear: they don't want to sign an agreement and be attacked again in three months or one year.
In order to get that, they want a new security framework in its part of the world. They want Israel to suffer so its population think two times before doing this again. And they want to create enough economic pain to punish the current USA administration, again to teach a lesson.
Go beyond CNN or Fox News, listen to what the Iranians are saying (1).
1- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNZ_nta8NRM
Yes, of course they want to continue to do what they've been doing and not be attacked for that. Yet it is just not possible. Iran's current regime overall main goal is the spread of Islamic Revolution. Hezbollah, Hamas, Houthis - these are typical metastasis of that spread. Terrorist acts, highly visible ones, is one of the effective tools of such a spread, and that way the terrorist acts are rational in the minds of Iran's regime and their above mentioned metastatic followers. There is no security framework possible which would still allow such a spread.
Anyway, it's kind of funny that the USA have military posts more than 7000 miles away from its borders, but the danger of 'expansionism' is from Iran.
We are in a fantasy propaganda land where Iran is attacked in the middle of negotiations and is Iran the guilty party. How many people have to die in those USA wars? I mean, enough is enough.
if you aren't familiar with Hezbollah, Hamas, Houthis - i highly recommend reading on it, even if just in Wikipedia.
>How many people have to die in those USA wars? I mean, enough is enough.
I think most important isn'h how many, the most important is who. Iran's regime has just indiscriminately killed 20-30K innocent civilians and uncountable many have been tortured. That is a crime against humanity. So, the top of Iran's regime and its IRGC has to be punished. I'm fine with that punishment being US and Israel's missiles.
Israel's regime has killed twice that many in Gaza. Shouldn't they be prioritized for "punishment"?
Israel started the war in response to the genocide of Oct 7. So all the legitimate collateral victims and damage from Israel's actions here is responsibility of the perpetrators of Oct 7.
You aren't calling for prosecution of the perpetrators of Oct 7. That is already shows your colors.
Anyway, the number of killed you cite comes directly from Hamas (its Ministry of Health stated those numbers to UN). Hamas is a terrorist org, and can't be trusted at all.
There is no evidence that Israel killed civilians in any meaningful numbers, and that the killings were criminal and not legitimate collateral.
Now, there is a million of cell phones in Gaza. After several years of watching Ukraine war anybody knows the amount of cell footage to expect. Some Russian killings in Bucha were recorded by reconnaissance drone for example. Russian soldiers posted videos of them executing POWs, security cameras recorded Russian soldiers marauding and so forth. Where is pretty much no footage comes from Gaza. "Israel soldiers shoot at the crowd at food distribution center" and nobody recorded anything (especially giving that according to Hamas it happens regularly - and still no footage!)
And on rare occasions when some footage comes out - the analysis in the example below shows that the basic laws of physics wouldn't let even 20 people to be killed when Hamas claimed 400-800 in that "bombing of hospital" (again, if you watch war footage, you'd know what gore of several people killed by explosion would look like, and no way the parking lot would look that way just the morning several hours later - where is all the blood for example? it is pretty obvious that the asphalt hadn't been washed by the time photo was made so blood should be there even if they picked up all the bodies and parts of it)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38751882
>You aren't calling for prosecution of the perpetrators of Oct 7. That is already shows your colors.
The world did not start on October 7th, and it's completely disingenuous to suggest otherwise, which shows YOUR colors. I could equally state " all responsibility lies with the perpetrators of the Nakhba".
>Anyway, the number of killed you cite comes directly from Hamas (its Ministry of Health stated those numbers to UN). Hamas is a terrorist org, and can't be trusted at all.
If the number can't be trusted, why is the IDF acknowledging it?
https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-believes-70000-gazans-kill...
> There is no evidence that Israel killed civilians in any meaningful numbers, and that the killings were criminal and not legitimate collateral.
If this is your position no further discussion is needed. There is nothing meaningful to be gained from engaging with you. I don't know if you guys realize how insane you appear to every other human being on the planet when you try to gaslight us into thinking the piles of evidence of dead women and children either doesn't exist or is somehow accidental.
Why was Hamas created? From wikipedia: "was founded by Palestinian Islamic scholar Ahmed Yassin in 1987 after the outbreak of the First Intifada against the Israeli occupation"
What about the Houthis? From wikipedia: "The formation of the Houthi organisations has been described by Adam Baron of the European Council on Foreign Relations as a reaction to foreign intervention."
But sure, the problem is Iran.
There is not evidence about that 20-30k civilians dead. I could say it was 3 and I would have the same proof that you have.
This rationale of 'Iran is not democratic enough' (despise they have a constitution, a parliament and elections) but I will support Saudi Arabia (that light of human rights in the middle east) is nonsense.
All this is done for the geopolitical interest of USA, the oil and Israel. Anyone that say otherwise is taking us for idiots.
As i said you don't know what you're talking about. You seem to be just blabbering some gibberish. I'm not engaging with you anymore here.
https://www.rferl.org/a/iran-protest-death-toll-ofogh-tv/336...
"The government of Iran's reformist President Masud Pezeshkian has published the names and national ID numbers of 2,985 individuals killed during recent nationwide protests."
Buncha drones in shipping containers that popped open once deep in-country
surely a New York Post article quoting a Fox News "expert" will be factual, unbiased and not at all an attempt to pour more oil into the fire and manufacture consent to bomb a couple more girl's schools.
I don't even think they'd launch drones to DC either, they seem to be all in on attacking oil infrastructure as well as us bases & defense systems in the Middle East, rather than America.
Because they allegedly have a ship already in the Pacific loaded with drones.
DC and NY are way too far from Iran to launch any kind of attack; the only attack they can possibly do is from a ship, and ships can be anyplace where there's deep enough water.
BBC: Mystery New Jersey drones not from Iranian 'mothership' - Pentagon
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crrwz91wqd9o
It's certainly a theory / narrative that keeps appearing in the media.
Maybe the US reacts differently, but in Europe most military bases have been scouted by Russian drones, and afaik none were shot down.
That does not make any sense to me. Does Iran have a bunch of ships in the Pacific? Why? How would they even got close enough to the US coast without being noticed at this point?
I'm not saying it's not true, I just don't understand.
However if they were going/able to do it, they probably wouldn't warn everyone and ruin the element of surprise, they would just do it.
Seems like a really dumb idea right now, unless maybe as a last resort if Trump decides to drop tactical nukes or something
Are you referring to a paradigm where people make their systems less secure in the effort to make them more secure?
This kind of aggression, however, does seem to make their value as a deterrent clear.
Observe how nobody is fucking with North Korea like they did with Iraq or Venezuela.
Unlike NK, Iran has a leadership that declared destroying some countries their raison d'etre.
Also in a "if I'm going down, everyone else is going down with me", which is Ian's strategy in this war (for good reasons). If the IRGC had nukes, and was severely threatened (like, killing the Supreme Leader and threatening to kill all of the replacements until they bend to the US/Israel will), they might have decided to go out "with style".
To be clear I don't like the idea of MAD one bit. But this is indeed how it's meant to work.
They want Islam to dominate the world, that can't happen if there isn't a world left to dominate.
I belive that US tech firms have increasingly become valid military targets. There was a post about this yesterday [1]. BUT I don't think that extends to hospitals and medical supplies, regardless of who owns them or if they treat soldiers or not.
But, as best as I can tell, the company has been inconvenienced, possibly massively. Let's put this in context. The US launched a Tomahawk missile at a school and killed 160 school girls.
And I bet that if you look into pretty much any company hit by a hack, you'll find cost-cutting on IT to increase executive pay and bonuses.
Between the Iran-Iraq war, which the US was responsible for, and decades of sanctions, the US has by this point killed millions of Iranians. The real problem here is the general ignorance of the average American of America's 70+ years of war crimes against Iran [2].
I mean this as analysis, not justification. But at some point the incredulity at blowback rings hollow.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47341007
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47342791
But given the growth in destructive power, particularly with the advent of the nuclear age, it became necessary to establish some rules or norms for war and I'm referring specifically to the Geneva Conventions [1]. Conventions here cover that wounded people and civilians aren't military targets. So it's not my opinion or Iran's opinion that matters.
The question then is do we live in an interntional rules-based order or not? The US and Israel have ignored the rules-based order in favor of "might is right" politics.
As for tech firms, I'm sorry but a company like Palantir has made itself a valid military target [2][3]. And if you work there, you are really no different from the Reaper Drone pilot who fires Hellfire missiles at, say, a wedding procession [4].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_Conventions
[2]: https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/
[3]: https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/palantir...
[4]: https://aoav.org.uk/2014/drone-strike-yemen/
Not just US tech firms. So-called dual-use has been embedded into all kinds of what was previously exclusively civilian infrastructure including telecoms networks and data centres.
Of course dual-use has always been a thing up to a point, but there has been a shift in recent years to bring it right to the heart of military doctrine.
For example the UK's Strategic Defence Review 2025 and the new Defence Industrial Strategy:
"A new £11bn ‘Invest’ annual budget has also been established under the NAD. This will fund kit for our front-line forces which is affordable and grows our UK industrial base. Our new partnership with industry and a decade of consistently rising defence spending will encourage more private finance to grow our world-leading scale-up and dual-use tech companies."
"Today, much of the best innovation is found in the private sector, while the increasing prevalence of dual-use technologies has widened the net of potential suppliers that can contribute to Defence outcomes."
The way things are going it won't just be tech firms that will be considered 'legitimate targets'.
Are you suggesting that's an inside job and/or false flag attack? If it's not a false flag attack, why imply that the reporting must be to "manufacture consent"? Shouldn't you expect major hacks to be reported?
I'm saying that the media suddenly covering stories like this isn't a coincidence. The media is a tool of the state to manufacture consent. Media literacy goes beyond just looking at the facts in a story. It's also what's not mentioned, how is it presented, what stories are written, what stories aren't and, most importantly, why.
All social media companies manufacture consent for American foreign policy. Pretty much all American media does the same.
I find all this particularly funny because our media does the exact thing we accuse the likes of Chinese media doing it. We just pretend it doesn't happen here or are oblivious to it.
What do you mean "suddenly"? Per the reddit thread, they just got hacked yesterday. It's not like they were sitting on the story until the war broke out. Moreover I see hacks covered in the media all the time, even if there's no obvious russia/iran/north korea "manufacture consent" angle.
>Media literacy goes beyond just looking at the facts in a story. It's also what's not mentioned, how is it presented, what stories are written, what stories aren't and, most importantly, why.
There's a huge gulf between "taking every story at face value" and what you're doing which is seemingly assuming every story must be part of some sinister conspiracy to "manufacture consent".
There are constant hacks of companies. Most of them don't get covered. So there's that. But it's also how it's framed. It's an "Iranian cyberattack". Interesting.
Couldn't an equally valid headline be "Lax security results in Stryker getting hacked"? Probably (just guessing).
It's a bit like all the stories about the Chinese stealing IP and jobs. Ok, let's assume those claims are true and have been for decades. So why do companies keep offshoring there knowing this will happen? At what point do you blame short-term cost-cutting by bonus-hunting executives?
My point is that the media is playing along and you're going to get a lot of "Iran = bad" stories because of it.
Source? You can't just be like "some hacks don't get covered, this hack got covered, therefore there must be some ulterior motive behind this". If the baseline rate for reporting hacks is like 50% (random number), then the fact that it got reported doesn't tell us much. Moreover Stryker Corporation is a S&P 500 company, and this hack had major impact on their business. It's not just some data that got leaked, all their laptops/phones got wiped. It's exactly the type of hack that I'd expect to not get swept under the rug.
>It's an "Iranian cyberattack". Interesting.
Again, unless you're going for the false flag or inside job excuse, the hacker's note makes it pretty clear that it's Iranian backed, or at least by Iranian sympathizers.
>Couldn't an equally valid headline be "Lax security results in Stryker getting hacked"? Probably (just guessing).
>It's a bit like all the stories about the Chinese stealing IP and jobs. Ok, let's assume those claims are true and have been for decades. So why do companies keep offshoring there knowing this will happen? At what point do you blame short-term cost-cutting by bonus-hunting executives?
Same reason we don't put out headlines saying "women going to seedy club results in rape".
Manufacture consent for what? Starting a war with Iran? The US already did that, and didn't need any sort of consent.
If anything, this sort of story is more likely to manufacture opposition to the war, because folks already think the war is stupid, pointless, and never should have happened, and now they're suffering more for it.
Iran executed 1500 people in 2025, and usually execute between 50 and 500 every year. They arrested 50 000 protesters, a huge part of which will be put to death. You can say a lot against the Mollahs, and you'd be right , they're horrible but please don't lie, it makes the argument weaker, and seems like slopaganda.
Still, Saddam Hussein chemical bombs donated by the US killed way more Iranians than the regime killed over 50 years, so I think the 'just war' propaganda need to stop. Saudis killed at least 53k slaves over the past 10 years, and ordered some of those executed by their police, I don't see anybody in the US taking down the regime.
If Trump said that, it is propaganda aimed at the amazingly ignorant; Tomahawks are US-made and only used by the US, UK, and Australia, with the Netherlands and Japan having recently entered into agreements to deploy them.
But the coalition (is two nations really a coalition?) hasn't state regime change is the purpose of the war. Well, they did, and then changed their minds. Several times.
And, as I'm sure you're aware, knocking off the head of state in Iran doesn't necessarily move the needle on regime change. Dismantling the IRGC and removing the hardliners will be a long, dangerous operation and I doubt the US has the stomach for that. And Israel has already moved on to bombing Lebanon again.
While the Bush-era invasion of Iraq was indefensible (if it was defensible they wouldn't have needed to push the WMD lie to justify it) and their initial projections were as ridiculously optimistic as the Trump government's, the Bush crew were clearly ideologically committed to the project and willing to see it through to the end.
Trump's people are not. This is "move fast and break things" and "strong opinions weakly held" in geopolitical form.
More importantly, was having civil infrastructure destroyed ever, in any place in history, a catalyst for a "regime change"?
I really don't think Israel and the US care much about your people. Be careful with what you wish for. You just might get it.
While I'm sure that it did happen, it certainly wasn't 30k people. There's tons of videos of provocateurs shooting shotguns at police... What happens anywhere in the world when you start shooting at police?
But in the case of Israel, land of the religious ethno-state that has been literally committing acts of terror for 3 years straight in 4k, on video.. they were allowed continue governing themselves after killing or wounding 30k innocent children...
So you tell me what happens?
Plus 11k unconfirmed dead, according to HRANA, so at most 18k dead during the Iranian protests. They also jailed 50k people, and before the war, it seemed a third of those were destined to be executed if the trend continued.
Iran also execute between 50 and 500 people a year, every year, and in the last 5, it was closer to 500, culminating in 2025 where 1500 person got the death penalty.
A regime that has to kill that much is weak, and would probably have fallen on itself if the US hadn't launched any strikes.
It would take some unpleasant searching but I'm sure one can find the most recent incident of Hezbollah (not Hamas, Hezbollah are explicitly backed by Iran) either carrying out a missile or suicide bombing attach with the loss of Israeli civilian lives.
(disclaimer: the war of aggression against Iran by Israel and its decapitation attacks are also wrong)
What I find bizarre, is that China and Russia do this daily, and "oh well". If such states sent over people to, you know, do damage using a bomb instead of a hack, there'd be trouble. As in, two towers were damaged, and it set off 20 years of war ... mostly against the wrong states.
Yet if you cause death via subtle means, such as reducing hospital infra, or attack and destroy infra via hacking, meh. Oh well!
This sort of falls inline with all other compute issues that appear before all elected bodies on the planet. An immense lack of understanding and comprehension, coupled with an inability to act.
It's like how every country knows embassies are full of spies but they let them operate as diplomats anyway because they do the same thing.
Or in Iran’s case, they don’t.
Like children, at school
https://www.npr.org/2026/03/11/nx-s1-5744981/pentagon-iran-m...
Not to mention its own citizens, Iranian death squads, killing of women, there is literally no comparison between the purposeful, lack of any care or concern for life exhibited by Iran, and a literal accident with a missile.
To highlight that point, the US cares enough to investigate and discover just how such an unfortunate act happened.
See the accidental death section. Generally not considered a crime on its own.
There absolutely is a comparison. Both acts are evil. Just because Iran's regime has a history of even more heinous evil acts doesn't absolve the United States and Israel of their own evil acts.
I trust the US as much as Iran or North Korea to investigate themselves and find no fault.
And it's not a war started, its a "war" responding to decades of heinous, vicious, deadly funding of terrorist organizations, and bombing of innocent civilians.
Defending Iran is akin to defending a serial murderer. Or complaining that the serial murdered got shot while resisting arrest. Ridiculous.
I sincerely hope the decent people of Iran do get rid of this ridiculous, religiously ran and controlled state.
Assuming the killings weren't instigated by American or Israeli operatives
> And it's not a war started, its a "war" responding to decades of heinous, vicious, deadly funding of terrorist organizations, and bombing of innocent civilians.
As if the US hadn't been antagonizing Iran for decades. Trump broke the nuclear agreements (which Iran had been following), then refused to negotiate new ones, then joined Israel in their bloodlust for muslim blood. This war is aimless, and only serves to radicalize the Iranian people against Israel and the US. Which will inevitably result in even more bloodshed down the line.
This is the most head-slapping part of this whole situation. We had a nuclear deal and he pulled the US out of it for no good reason (my read: because he just hates Obama that much that anything he did he wanted to undo). This situation is 100% on this president.
If you can find evidence the United States directly targeted a school with the intent of killing children and not just due to outdated intel (and somebody setting up a school in what was once part of an Iranian Revolutionary Guard naval base), maybe I'd change my mind.
There seem to be actual people getting killed, in an actual war (by another name, but we all know it's a war, with missiles and airplanes and bombs).
Russia have been running assassinations and sabotage programme using poison, bombs, small arms and radioactive material in the West for years with no real repercussions.
What ramifications you think is going to happen? They already have their country being bombed.
Edit: this is one of those case where I would really love to see the face of the one who downvoted this comment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stryker
Unlike Ukraine, it does not, so it seems to be focusing on cyber vandalism and blowing up oil infrastructure in US vassal states, and other low-cost, high-ROI activities.
Their goal is to make it too troublesome for the US/Israel to continue attacking them, like a swarm of bees attacking a bear to keep it away from their honey.
Iran is in it to win it and the US is so very obviously not.
The question is if the pressure that Israel can put on the current administration greater than the pressure that Iran can put on America as a whole.
Time will tell.
> closing the iranian borders from the outside indefinitely
Are you proposing to disrupt China-Iran shipping? Intercept even Chinese-flagged oil vessels? (not that there are many, most are still under flags of convenience)
Shoot down China-Iran civilian airliners? (again)
Do you think Trump's going to lose interest and declare victory while bombs are still flying over Bibi's head?
I suppose that just claiming victory doesn't mean the US stops fighting