Timid is as Timid Does

Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden is upset that Russian President Vladimir Putin attacked, again and extensively, Ukraine’s power infrastructure. He said, through his National Security Council’s Spokesperson Adrienne Watson,

This bombardment—part of a series of Russian attacks on Ukraine’s critical infrastructure— is a terrible reminder of Vladimir Putin’s efforts to break the spirit of the Ukrainian people and plunge them into darkness[.]

Here is our President yapping like a porch dog from the safety of his NSC porch, along with (to mix metaphors) furiously wagging his finger at the barbarian.

While doing precisely nothing material to help the Ukrainians.

Biden is, for instance, holding up transfer of badly needed air defense systems, including Patriot and Stinger, while only “soon” will F-16s start arriving in Ukrainian inventory. Biden has chosen to do nothing regarding delivery of drone and anti-drone systems to Ukraine, forcing them to use those expensive Patriots they do have on far cheaper inbound drowns and missiles. Biden has chosen to do nothing regarding paying for the transfers he has deigned authorize, the lack of which pay-fors are at the core of Republican objections to further expenditures in favor of Ukraine.

How is this Possible?

Personal information of 7.6 million AT&T customers and of 65 million former AT&T customers have appeared on the dark web in the last two weeks. Stuff happens, even egregiously bad stuff. What makes this stuff especially egregiously bad, though, is AT&T‘s claim that the data appear[] to have come from 2019 or earlier.

That especially bad status flows from some questions:

Why wasn’t the data breach discovered those 5 or more years earlier; why did AT&T not know of the breach of its own systems until they saw the results of the breach just recently?

If AT&T did know of the breach those years ago, why did they sit on the information all this time?

If AT&T did discover the data breach promptly, and the data that appeared on the dark web only happened to be from 2019 and prior, what were the safe guards in place—or not—for what would have been archived data? What are the safeguards for data from 5 years ago through to the present? How does AT&T know those data haven’t been penetrated and stolen, also?