Government Cybersecurity Ad Knows It's Not That Simple
Description
This is a photograph of a recruitment advertisement displayed inside a public transit vehicle, likely a bus or train. The ad, which has a black background and green, monospaced text to mimic a computer terminal, is for the Communications Security Establishment (CSE) of Canada. The most prominent text is a command-line prompt: '$ sudo ./stop_all_hackers.sh'. Below this, in smaller white text, it reads: 'You know it's not that easy. Join us and keep Canada safe from cyber threats.' followed by the URL 'cse-cst.gc.ca/careers'. The humor is a self-aware joke aimed at a technical audience; it acknowledges that stopping cyber threats is incredibly complex and can't be solved with a single, simplistic shell script. This inside joke serves as a filter, appealing directly to experienced cybersecurity professionals who understand the absurdity of the command and appreciate the nuanced recruiting approach
Comments
15Comment deleted
The script failed. It seems 'hackers.sh' is missing the '--i-solemnly-swear-i-am-up-to-no-good' flag
If “sudo ./stop_all_hackers.sh” actually worked, our entire incident-response runbook would be a cron job and the CISO would be out buying bus ads instead of SIEM licenses
After 20 years in the industry, I've learned that the real vulnerability isn't in the code - it's in believing a shell script named 'stop_all_hackers.sh' would make it past code review without someone suggesting we containerize it first and add proper observability
Ah yes, the classic government approach to cybersecurity: just sudo a shell script to stop all hackers. If only APT groups and nation-state actors respected file permissions and politely terminated when you sent them SIGTERM. The real irony? They're recruiting on public transit while the actual threat actors are probably already inside the perimeter, having exploited that unpatched Jenkins instance from 2019. But hey, at least they acknowledge 'it's not that easy' - that's more self-awareness than most RFPs demonstrate when they ask for 'military-grade encryption' and a two-week delivery timeline
Nothing says 'mature security program' like a root-only script with a comma in the path; defense in depth via FileNotFoundError
Sudo all hackers? Cute - until the clearance process hits you with 'Permission denied: bureaucracy'
CSE recruiting ad: $ sudo ,/stop_all_hackers.sh - great hiring filter; if you catch the comma, add a shebang, and know sudo won’t fix threat modeling, you’re already doing the job
permission denied: stop_all_hackers.sh Comment deleted
This incident has been reported. Comment deleted
You know, Im something of a programmer myself Comment deleted
forgot —no-preserve flag Comment deleted
rm for kids. Men use dd Comment deleted
Inside script: sudo shutdown now Comment deleted
fish: The file “./stop_all_hackers.sh” is not executable by this user Comment deleted
sudo: ./stop_all_hackers.sh: command not found Comment deleted