The Hidden History of Big Brother in America by Thom Hartmann

Author:Thom Hartmann
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers

How Trump Undermined Our Cybersecurity

A few years before the Russian action, right after taking office in 2009, President Obama gave a speech revealing that both his and Senator John McCain’s campaigns had been hacked, as was his personal credit card.

He kicked off a robust new agency within the White House to coordinate cybersecurity across federal agencies so that America wouldn’t get caught flat-footed like we were on 9/11 when the FBI and CIA both had essential parts of the Bin Laden puzzle but failed to connect the dots.

J. Michael Daniel was Obama’s head of the office of the Cybersecurity Coordinator and special assistant to the president, working with a substantial team out of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next door to the White House. All the bells and alarms from more than 20 US security agencies, from those associated with the military to the FBI, CIA, NSA, and parts of the government that don’t even have public names, coordinated with his operation.

They watched with horror as the day before Christmas Eve, the busiest shopping day of 2015, Russia took down Ukraine a year after voters in that country had expelled a Russian-friendly oligarch, Viktor Yanukovych, and replaced him with a Western-friendly president, Oleksandr Turchynov.

And by “take down,” I mean it almost literally. Kim Zetter told the story of a supervisor at one of Ukraine’s main power substations in Wired: “All he could do was stare helplessly at his screen while the ghosts in the machine clicked open one breaker after another, eventually taking about 30 substations offline. The attackers didn’t stop there, however. They also struck two other power distribution centers at the same time, nearly doubling the number of substations taken offline and leaving more than 230,000 residents in the dark. And as if that weren’t enough, they also disabled backup power supplies to two of the three distribution centers, leaving operators themselves stumbling in the dark.”9

It was the second consequential cyberattack (the first being Stuxnet) of one nation-state against another. Prior hacks, mostly by Iran, North Korea, and China, were designed to extort money via ransomware, steal money directly from people’s bank accounts or credit cards, or steal product designs and other intellectual properties that could be converted to profit.

But there was no profit motive here, nor in the Stuxnet attack. Both were acts of war.

The United States still had the most powerful cyberweapons in the world, but the Russians were no slouches. For example, back in 2007 when the Estonians (a former Soviet state) removed an old Soviet-era statue from a public square, Russian hackers pulled the internet plug on the entire nation; for a brief while, no traffic got in or out of the country.10

In 2016, the US cyberwarfare equivalents of our nuclear arsenal were hacked from our intelligence agencies (particularly the NSA) and put up for sale on the dark web. One of those cybernukes, named by the NSA EternalBlue, was integrated into a new cyberweapon now known as NotPetya and used a year later, June 27, 2017, against Ukraine.

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