Sign in. It’s quick, free and it’s up to you.
An account is an optional way to support the work we do. Find out more.
TRIBUTES HAVE BEEN paid to Detective Garda Colm Horkan today by his friends, family and colleagues after a man was found guilty of the capital murder of the detective yesterday.
A friend of Garda Colm Horkan, John Hynes, spoke about his “exceptionally close friend” with Claire Byrne on RTÉ Radio 1 this morning. Hynes said that he and Garda Horkan had built up their bond working together over the decades.
Hynes met Colm Horkan in 1999 when he was the sergeant of Unit B in Castlerea, Co Roscommon. Hynes said, “He was put onto my unit… I knew from the very start that I had got a very, very good member. His attention to detail in every single thing he did was very obvious.”
The retired sergeant told Claire Byrne that he was “so, so lucky” to have met and had Garda Horkan in his unit. Hynes said they would spend a long time investigating cases together and through that got to know each other very well.
Yesterday, Steven Silver was found guilty of capital murder by a jury. On the verdict, Hynes said, “Colm is gone, it won’t bring Colm back. But it will certainly bring closure and especially with the verdict that the jury brought back.”
Speaking outside the Central Criminal Court yesterday, Garda Horkan’s brother Brendan said the verdict gave their family closure and labelled his late brother as a “gentleman through and through”. Garda Horkan had 25 years of service and no disciplinary issues on his record.
Brendan Horkan added that the family was “horrified and shocked” to learn about the details of his brother’s death. “Colm was a fantastic son, brother, uncle and friend, and his memory remains etched in our minds every minute of every day.”
Hynes said that Garda Horkan was a “one of a kind”.
The kind of person that comes along once in a lifetime. I certainly will never ever meet anyone like him again.”
His family described him, similarly, on the first anniversary of his death, as a “proud, popular, respected member of An Garda Síochána who loved his job and wore the uniform with great pride while serving the community for over 25 years”.
John Hynes said that he spent the last 15 years of his career investigating child sexual assault cases: “Colm was involved in every single arrest and interview we carried out. Not everyone wanted to do it, but someone had to do it… So that was the driving force for both myself and Colm.”
Garda Commissioner Drew Harris described yesterday as a “sombre day, in particular for Colm Horkan’s family and friends, and for everybody in Colm’s wider Garda family” after the trail.
Commissioner Harris said, “Colm’s death reinforces to every member of An Garda Síochána the reality of the dangers and the uncertainty of the work that we face every day.
“I want to pay tribute to the Garda investigation team in Castlerea Garda station, supported by the wider Garda organisation, that professionally investigated all the circumstances of Colm’s murder,” he added.
Minister for Justice Simon Harris also shared his thoughts with the family of Garda Horkan and said his murder “reminded us of the risks the brave men and women of An Garda Síochána take every day”.
Garda Horkan signed his weapon out on the afternoon of 17 June 2020, and later was shot 11 times with the same gun that evening by Stephen Silver. The court heard that Silver had a “seething resentment” towards gardaí and that the shooting was “a deliberate action done with the intent of murder”.
Minister Harris said, “Colm’s murder in June 2020 shocked us all. It stole from his family and friends a beloved, kind and gentle man who served with duty and distinction, keeping his community safe and serving the State.”
Silver told the court that he believed that Garda Horkan was attempting to kill him and admitted to shooting the Garda “until the gun finished and there was no ammunition left”.
After over eight hours of deliberation the jury found Stephen Silver, who has been on remand since his arrest in June 2020, guilty of the capital murder of Detective Garda Colm Horkan.
Silver, who now faces a mandatory 40 years in prison, made no reaction to the verdict given by the jury. Following the verdict, Ms Justice Burns thanked the jury and excused them from jury service for the rest of their lives.
Microsoft must be the only company in the world that can launch flawed deeply broken products and have no commercial repercussions.
Bill gates should be made spend some of his billions on creating products that are not completely flawed and full of holes.
@brian boru: There is no such thing as a piece of software that is 100% secure beacuse tomorrow the tech/software will be invented to make it only 99% secure and then 98% etc. Microsoft patched this when it was leaked the problem is the NSA allowed it to be leaked and showed it off to all the hackers out there, its the NSA’s fault this hack was not raised to MS before it got leaked as well as the people in charge of all the places that got hit who only understand why spending money on upgrades is necessary after the fact
@Ian McNally: 100% agree. NSA/US government caused this. Apple have been proven right regarding creating an iPhone hack tool. If you create it, it will get into criminal hands
@brian boru: Really? Are there no flaws in other operating systems?
XP was released 16 years ago and all of the current operating systems are patched.
And they’re not flawed deeply. They’re being hacked.
If you’re able to write software without bugs your daily rate must be astronomical. Congratulations.
@brian boru: this is a software system that is many years old. Microsoft made a huge deal of the fact that they would no longer support it years ago. In fact, they delivered a security update in March this year to protect against this attack vector. If people are too stupid to update their ancient software when Microsoft rushes out a patch for something they no longer support. You got to figure it is their problem.
@brian boru:
Written by someone who clearly had no idea of what they are talking about
@brian boru: It isn’t their problem that someone allowed 3rd party software to run on an unsupported system and infect connected networks.
Scary, if this effects the social welfare payments we could see mass panic and riots in the country.
@Dave Hogan: There will be army on the streets if any TD / conSultans / bankers payments would be affected…
My Nespresso machine wouldn’t pour my morning Americano earlier. My first reaction aptly was I wanna cry. Could this malware be inside my nespresso machine?
@John O’shea: Is it plugged in?
Anyone still using Windows XP deserves help. A migration to linux would leave them
a) without exposure to all the Windows-specific viruses and trojans
b) with support for all of their peripherals
c) with an up to date and supported OS where you do not sign a licence agreement that gives MS full access to all of your data
d) with an OS which runs updates in less than a minute, in the background without stress
e) which is free and can be installed and reinstalled as many times as you like with no licence issues
With regards to b) … I migrated from XP to Win7 when it became available and found that my printer and scanner no longer were supported with MS drivers.
A switch to LinuxMint left me with fully working printer+scanner and no need to buy an antivirus suite – plus it comes with a firewall and even provides an antivirus suite to allow you to scan attachments from windows users to clean them before sending them on to other windows users.
@The Sagacious Man: Which one of 100+ linuxes you recommend to move to ??
@The Sagacious Man: Very helpful. Thanks
@The Sagacious Man: how well does it support all the esoteric bits of equipment in use in specialist areas like medicine?
Linux Mint is the best at the moment for anyone migrating from Windoze. All my home and studio machines run it and I only use Windoze for professional proprietary software. If anyone is just using a computer for browsing or office etc there is no need for MS hell.
@Patrick J. O’Rourke: Do people still use Winsoze & Linsux when referring to their OS? I thought most people had matured from that now.
@The Sagacious Man: unfortunately for most users, windows is the only stop. All others pale in comparison as user interface and support for connecting all of today’s devices just simply isn’t there. Windows or Mac … rest like Linux are for the more tech minded … most people haven’t the time.
They have internet on computers now ?
@Stephen: one day, I hope. Happy iStone user.
Article says this affects XP.
It’s not just XP.
7, 8 10 and the server OSes are included.
Make sure your machine is patched up to date.
@Michael O’Neill: yes that was a flaw in the article because it returned again later to discussing Windows XP. From the horses mouth, Microsoft, the exploit exists on every version of Windows out there, desktop and server up to and including Windows 10 and Server 2016.
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/security/ms17-010.aspx
What an utter pile of nonsense. Do you wants some facts?
A 22-year-old cybersecurity analyst accidentally shut down vast numbers of attacks by the devastating WannaCry ransomware by buying a domain name hidden in the program:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/05/13/a-british-researcher-says-he-found-a-kill-switch-for-the-malware-crippling-computers-worldwide/
Microsoft releases security patch for Windows Server 2003, Windows XP and Windows 8 to patch WannaCrypt exploit:
https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/msrc/2017/05/12/customer-guidance-for-wannacrypt-attacks/
@cortisola: There are new versions of the attack that don’t have this kill switch. Don’t rely on that.
@Michael O’Neill: Surely there are still holes in all known systems and you cant be 100% sure anything but we are talking about WannaCry 2 attack here.
@cortisola: The only nonsense are your “facts” That’s yesterday’s news. Try to keep up
The patch is irrelevant, completely and utterly so. All the exploit allowed was for an already infected machine to push the trojan onto another exploitable machine on the network.
It still happened because some idiot user clicked a link/attachment in an email without thinking and essentially invited the trojan onto the network.
If people stopped clicking on everything they see, this wouldn’t happen very often.
I had to write a document to send to users today clearly showing them what not to click and why.
You can have the most up to date, fully patched system there is but all it takes is one person to run an executable hiding in a zip file, run a macro in an office document or lick a link they shouldn’t and it’s all over.
Anti Virus is useful but it’s all about user education.
@Reuben Gray: yes, good advice (although the patch works so inhibit contamination) but someone in a large enough network will predictably click on links or attachments even when obviously highly suspect.
PWC has done anonymous testing sending in dubious and unauthorised links and attachments. 70% of users won’t ever access. The same 30% will always access. They just can’t help it.
@Reuben Gray: I wish. I do the user education in my place. All of the users have been trained and get frequent awareness updates.
When I do my phishing tests I still get up to 10% of users that’ll fall for them. I’ve yet to meet a HR dept that’ll allow me to sanction users that just won’t learn.
Patching means it won’t spread. The idiot that clicks the links will just be out of commission for a few hours while IT take their PC away for a rebuild.
@Reuben Gray: You can’t legislate for stupidity and user error but can you build up your projections. The quality of social engineering is getting better and very realistic.
@Michael O’Neill: One of the places I support had the same user cryptolock the entire network twice in as many weeks. Since that site pays ad-hoc, it was very expensive to sort out each time.
Any company using Windows xp deserve it. Upgrade your systems to an up to date and supported OS. Idiots
There should be an onus on Microsoft to support any of the operating systems they sold to the public. Withdrawing support for Windows Vista, XP etc was just a marketing ploy to sell their latest systems. It would happen then sooner rather than later that malware would be planted by hackers on obsolete unsupported operating systems. The perpetrators are in fact highlighting the problem and maybe inadvertently doing a favour for the future. By abandoning supporting the older systems Microsoft abandoned the people who had purchased the systems. The support should have been open ended.
@Micheal S. O’ Ceilleachair: So… Micorsoft (or Apple, or whoever) would need to employ teams of developers in perpetuity to work on obsolete OSes with ever-decreasing numbers of users? Unsustainable, and never going to happen. It’s not like the end of support for XP wasn’t flagged, literally years in advance. It got support for 12 years and that support ran out over 3 years ago…
@Whitsun Healy-RaeNua: there was the economic downturn also and businesses weren’t too keen to invest either. Getting applications upgraded to support new OS is a problem not likely to disappear in the near future.
@Micheal S. O’ Ceilleachair: MS support is usually for 5 years plus another 5 extended support. They will offer support but at a cost.
For Windows 10 Pro, security patch MS17-010 works.
This has reinforced my attention to ensure that updates are applied.
Next is what? Bio weapon attack?
Microsoft will be delighted to hear how many authentic XP licencees were out there….
30,000 Chinese institutions, using who knows how many instances, due to upgrade to Windows 10 sometime soon.
Scientists used a mobile connected to a laptop to put a virus in a car so that its steering and breaks wouldn’t work.
With everything connected to a program then nothing is safe not even nuclear power plants?
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150421/23581430744/gm-says-that-while-you-may-own-your-car-it-owns-software-it-thanks-to-copyright.shtml
https://www.wired.com/2015/04/dmca-ownership-john-deere/?mbid=social_fb_onsiteshare
have your say