The Unhackable Internet by Thomas P. Vartanian;

Author:Thomas P. Vartanian;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing
Published: 2022-10-22T00:00:00+00:00

CYBERATTACKS GET NOTICED

CNA Financial suffered a ransomware attack in March 2021 impacting employee and customer services for three days. In addition to losses attributable to downtime, reputational damage, and all the other remedial actions CNA had to take, it reportedly paid $40 million in ransom to unlock its data.18 Then in May 2021, two more massive shots were fired across the bow of the U.S. cyber defense system when Colonial Pipeline announced that a ransomware cyberattack had forced it to close operations and temporarily halt pipeline operations. Hackers had entered its networks on April 29 using a leaked password later found on the Dark Web to enter a virtual private network (VPN) account that didn’t use multifactor authentication. On May 7, an employee had found a ransom note on his computer just before 5 a.m. demanding cryptocurrency. The entire pipeline was shut down by 6:10 a.m.19 Colonial paid a ransom of $4.4 million in Bitcoin as supply lines dried up and gas lines formed due to East Coast stockpiles of gasoline dropping by about 4.6 million barrels.20

This was followed by a cyberattack on the largest beef supplier in the world by REvil, a Russian-speaking hacker gang. JBS S.A., a Brazilian-based meat-processing company, supplies approximately one-fifth of meat globally. JBS’s American facilities in Utah, Texas, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Nebraska were among those disrupted or rendered temporarily inoperative. This attack underscored the vulnerability of the world’s food supplies. JBS paid the hackers an $11 million ransom in Bitcoin.21

On May 12, President Biden issued an executive order that resembled those issued by Presidents Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump. It began with penetrating insight into the obvious—the country faces persistent and increasingly sophisticated malicious cyber campaigns that threaten the public sector, the private sector, and ultimately the American people’s security and privacy, and the federal government must improve its efforts to detect and respond against these actions and actors.22 The order sought, among other things, to remove restrictions that might limit the sharing of threat or incident information among executive departments and agencies. While one would have thought that these things had been done years ago, it also sought to “modernize” the government’s approach to cybersecurity through the adoption of best practices, zero-trust architectures, secure cloud services, and the centralization of cybersecurity data. It established yet another new bureaucracy, the Cyber Safety Review Board, to review and assess significant cyber incidents.

The order should be commended for focusing on software supply chain issues, including the need for the creation of a seal of approval for algorithmically based products that meet certain security standards. But it was silent on the equally complex security issues created by computer hardware. That would be indirectly confronted in an executive order issued on June 3, 2021, dealing with the threats posed by the military-industrial complex of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), including Huawei Technologies.

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