If the hackers turn their attention to disruption and destruction, as some have threatened, they are likely to find the controls for electric power grids, oil pipelines and precious water systems inadequately secured. If a hacker causes real physical damage to critical systems in that region, it could quickly involve governments retaliating against each other with both cyber and conventional weapons.
Obviously, this is meant to sound very serious. If hackers, by implied extension — Anonymous, could do such things it’s time to get ahead of the curve and declare them an existential threat to the country.
Anonymous is many things: Audacious. Adept with publicity. Very troubling to some segments of establishment America. (Kind of like OWS.)
However, an existential threat to the United States isn’t one of them. But there’s certainly money in trying to make people believe it.
Clarke is a 1 percenter and his fortune has been in cybersecurity.
[But lately Richard Clarke has] spent much of his time on cyber security through his consulting practice Good Harbor Consulting, an editorial in The Wall Street Journal, an upcoming book and the boards of two venture-backed security start-ups …
Q. Why are you joining the board of Bit9?
[Clarke]: Standard solutions that people have used for years — firewalls and antivirus — are still needed, but not sufficient. I’ve seen companies where advanced persistent threats had gotten through and companies where they hadn’t gotten through. The difference turns out to be Bit9.
Despite National Security Agency director Gen. Keith Alexander’s reported concerns that the Anonymous hacking group might try to attack the North American power grid, experts consider such a scenario to be extremely unlikely and Anonymous spokesmen dismiss the whole idea as “ridiculous.”
In an article in today’s (Feb. 21) Wall Street Journal, reporter Siobhan Gorman writes that Alexander, in private meetings at the White House, has said Anonymous “could have the ability within the next year or two to bring about a limited power outage through a cyberattack.”
Of course, it is — as usual — completely unnecessary to provide any bolstering evidence for such a presumption.
I was polled. So cutting to it:
George Smith is a senior fellow at GlobalSecurity.org. He told SecurityNewsDaily that not only has Anonymous never threatened an attack like the NSA claims, but that if such an attack were possible, it would have happened already.
“Talk is cheap in cyberspace,” Smith said. “Restraint, however, is not. If someone could have easily done this — and they can’t — they wouldn’t have been able to resist doing it just for bragging rights.”
Smith said hackers have always bragged about “being able to turn out the lights,” and the imagined threat has become a talking point for politicians and lawmakers.
“People who talk about cyberwar and what can be done have abused this one for well over a decade,” he said. “I have materials in my files predicting the lights will be turned out that are well over ten years old.”
One of the central features of cyberwar/cyberattack scaremongering is argument from authority. Us officials have abused it for personal and political agendas for well over a decade. In the process, they’ve destroyed any legitimacy, relying totally on fantastic and apocalyptic claims, never backing anything up other than with assertion one had better listen up because very important people are all repeating the same thing. Noam Chomsky called it manufacturing consent. Now it’s gulling the rubes for personal gain.
This has resulted in a repeated mythology rather than a serious body of thought and debate people would do well to consider. As far as mythologies go, it’s a technical one, its legends — that the power grid will go down, that water will be contaminated, that the financial system will be corrupted (the latter is particularly atrocious in light of reality) — unique to our national circumstances.
It’s ripe for exploitation and that’s just what our authorities do with it in the fear-based economy.
Working hard at it, another bog standard journalist churns out his bog standard feature on electrical doomsday, at the Boston Globe.
Contained therein, all the assertions and scenarios delivered by authority, again demonstrating what I’ve come to believe is a profound defect in the American national security mind brought on by US paranoia and the growth of the fear-based economy.
A few months back, I made the mistake of falling asleep with the television on, tuned to C-Span. While a torpid House hearing on finance lulled me to sleep, sometime during my REM rebound I found myself in the middle of a Day After-style nightmare. Turns out, I was emerging from my slumber during a forum dominated by EMPact America, a well-funded advocacy group spreading the word about the looming threats of an EMP attack.
These guys know how to scare the daylights out of you. The most prominent EMP hawk is Newt Gingrich, who peppered some of last year’s presidential debates with mini-lectures about the threat. “Without adequate preparation,??? Gingrich said at one EMP conference, “we would basically lose our civilization in a matter of seconds.??? There is real science behind the EMP fears, though some energy and national security analysts contend the EMP lobby greatly exaggerates the threat. (Boldface mine. It took years to force this unattributed concession.)
Analyst Sue Tierney is far more concerned about cyber threats. No bomb needed – just serious hacking qualifications, and these days it seems everybody knows a gloomy 17-year-old who’s got those. In what is widely believed to have been an Israeli-American covert effort, the Stuxnet computer worm was unleashed on the Iranian nuclear program in 2010, ruining about a fifth of the centrifuges the country uses to enrich uranium. It would be naive to think our country won’t eventually find itself on the other side of a similar attack.
Several years ago, Tierney was part of a National Academies task force charged with identifying the grid’s vulnerability to terrorists. With the World Trade Center in mind, the task force largely concentrated on trying to anticipate another Al Qaeda-style conventional attack. If Tierney were serving on the task force right now, she says, she would push for even more focus on guarding against cyber threats.
But the chairman of the task force, Granger Morgan, says that what continues to worry him the most is the havoc that bad guys could cause with relatively little technological savvy. “If I’m a terrorist, I can shut down the power system in a lot simpler ways than using a valuable nuclear device,??? says Morgan, an engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon University and a noted authority on the grid. “All I need to do is destroy a bunch of major substations.??? Despite all the talk about strengthening security after 9/11, he says, “big transformers continue to sit there on pads out in the open, with only chain-link fences around them.???
Any way you look at it, these are real threats that need to be treated seriously. Don’t take my word for it. After Morgan’s task force finalized its report, the US Department of Homeland Security swooped in and classified the document. Federal officials didn’t want to give the terrorists any ideas. Not that they need any.
“Don’t take my word for it.” Good advice many sensible people will probably heed.
One would assume the Department of Homeland Security has classified many things. This being the case classification is not necessarily any imprimatur of a dangerous reality waiting to unfold.
Anyway, here again: National security experts like grains of sand on the beach, each with their version of doomsday. Always reliant on argument from authority in a country where the government and business interests aligned with security spending have spent the past decade destroying the legitimacy of such argument.
In a side note it’s worth mentioning the national publicity accruing to Newt Gingrich has actually hurt the relatively insignificant Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy lobby. It’s easy to see he’s utterly despised by a majority in Washington. So are his ideas.
Even though they may appear on C-SPAN, anyone can really if they throw a luncheon/talk in DC, EMPAct America is so out of power in recent months they resorted to employing a spammer to post backlinks to themselves in the comments sections. My spam filter kept catching them. Eventually they gave up on it. (Oops, spoke to soon. Just spied another in the spam filter for the old blog which stopped updating over a year ago.)
Found in my my inbox yesterday: “It is not difficult, nor does it take a nation-state, to compromise the North American electric grid.”
Taking up the first 130 words of a 1700 word piece on the potential for cyberattack, an Asbury Park Press reporter presents what’s standard practice — the fictional doomsday.
Power generators at a plant in New Jersey spin wildly out of control, then grind to a halt.
Other utilities step in to carry the extra load, but they, too, suffer internal malfunctions. Soon, cascading outages take out the power grid in the eastern half of the country – all carefully timed to happen in the dead of winter. Gas utilities are next.
But this isn’t like the week without power in parts of Central Jersey caused by downed limbs and trees felled by the freak October snowstorm. Power is out for much longer because the heavily damaged equipment is difficult to replace.
No heat, no running water, no toilets, no phones. Small generators die when fuel quickly runs dry. Hospitals, transportation, the banking system, the telecommunications grid – all down.
An apocalyptic fantasy or an actual threat? The prospect is something political and military leaders and security analysts have been raising alarms about for several years.
Former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Michael Mullen, who retired in September, said during his tenure that cyberattacks pose an “existential threat??? to the United States.
Over the holidays I was a source for the piece. For the phone chat, which lasted long enough, the readers gets:
Yet not every expert buys the grim scenario of a downed electrical grid.
It’s almost progress. Most of the time such stories don’t contain anything but the presentation of a future doomsday and then three or four business interests or government men saying it’s all true.
But first, a detour. Which Doomsday will strike the country first?
The consequences of a successful attack against critical infrastructure makes these cost increases look like chump change. It would put people into the Dark Ages???, commented Larry Ponemon, chairman of the Ponemon Institute.
The Dark Ages. Sounds bad.
To a person, all the journalists I’ve spoken with (and there have been lots over the last decade) never step outside their beats to see how regular the warnings about doomsday are in every domain having to do with national security. If they do, these things either don’t register or are considered unimportant, not part of their world.
I’ve not infrequently asked something like which doomsday is it to be? All of them? One? Some? None? How can you tell from reading the usual public testimony of the experts?
I’ve come to believe there’s a defect in American thinking, one brought about by the conjunction of national paranoia after 9/11 and the fear-based economy. And that defect paralyzes the ability to think critically, to take time to consider the passage of recent history, context and perspective. It can also be said that it’s virtually impossible to get someone to look at things a little differently when their job and usefulness to higher ups depends on them always predicting disaster.
It’s far easier to just shut up and unquestioningly accept all the arguments presented from authority. The only silver lining, and it’s a really thin one, is that reality just often doesn’t give a shit about what’s printed in newspapers, shown on tv and emitted in policy documents.
And this is, at the root, fundamentally what the Asbury Park Press news report, a long one for the topic, does. It presents two views but the one that gets the most attention is the implication that electrical grid collapse is probably coming because we’re not doing enough about it. And this is the central feature of all future doomsdays. There’s never enough being done. We cannot imagine what trouble awaits if the warnings are not heeded now.
For this the reporter commits one sin. But it’s one I repeatedly touched upon in interview.
And it has to do with the claim that “cyberintruders” caused power blackouts in foreign cities.
This is the infamous story of the Brazil blackouts.
Reporter Ken Serrano uses it as one of three examples of infrastructure cyberattack, given to him by James Lewis of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
It reads:
“A blackout in Brazil – it is hotly contested whether a cyberattack was responsible.”
Fair enough. Then the newspaper puts its fingers every so lightly on the scale.
Two or three paragraphs on Serrano writes:
In May 2009, President Barack Obama spoke about the risk of cyberattacks.
“We count on computer networks to deliver our oil and gas, our power and our water. We rely on them for public transportation and air traffic control,??? the president said. “Yet we know that cyberintruders have probed our electrical grid and that in other countries cyberattacks have plunged entire cities into darkness.???
Early in his presidency, Obama issued a preliminary cybersecurity strategy and this official statement was part of the news surrounding it.
One data point to demonstrate an argument cannot be made into two simply by passing it through different sources from authority, even if one of them is the president.
General interest readers are certainly unlikely to know such a thing. And they certainly do not understand nor should they be expected to know the genesis of all the myths and contested claims.
However, it is the journalist’s job to tell them. And the Asbury Park Press, for this feature, was apprised of the details.
In any case, eventually the “opposing view” is presented — in small print. (Read the story, note how all the bold print is employed. I had to grin a bit.)
Here is the opposing view, mine. And it’s a challenge none of the other sources polled for the story have any good answer for:
“If you make extraordinary claims, you need to produce extraordinary proof,??? said [George Smith, GlobalSecurity.Org Senior Fellow) who has been writing about national security and technology issues for more than a decade.
As for a blackout in Brazil in 2007 being caused by a cyberattack, he said, “It’s been debunked. They’ve never produced any extraordinary proof.???
Many in our government have become very accustomed to never providing extraordinary proof to back up anything. It is a very bad habit, one that has had horrible results for the country.
And James Lewis, resourced for the story and formerly an employee of the US government, simply goes back to the stock play book to answer the criticism:
Lewis stands by his sources on the Brazilian blackout, adding that it involved an insider and software manipulation.
Translated: I know it because I have sources.
James Lewis often appears in the news to discuss matters of national cybersecurity and cyberwar. Often what he is reported to say is informative and reasonable.
But for the newspaper this was lame. Everyone knows the standard abuse — the government man, or the ex-government man, always has the inside information. Their say trumps everyone else’s, no proof necessary. QED.
“Lewis fears that it will take a catastrophe for changes to occur,” reads the newspaper. Then, the inevitable mentions of Pearl Harbor and 9/11.
Cybersecurity remains a topic for serious discussion at the national and the grass roots level. And the Asbury Park Press is part of that. However, it’s also a topic that is not served by now far too overused appraisals of what’s going to happen.
Footnote:
Reads another quote from the Asbury Park Press:
“Stuxnet demonstrated how all industries can be at risk,??? said Joe Weiss, a blogger on cybersecurity and consultant to companies using Industrial Control Systems.
That consultant was responsible for a recent viral news story, now withdrawn, on alleged attack on a heartland water system, commented upon here.
“Israel, Finland and Sweden are more prepared than larger nations to fight a conflict in cyberspace, according to a McAfee-backed cyber-defence study,” reports the Register. (No link.)
Next:
The study, Cyber-security: The Vexed Question of Global Rules, is based on interviews with experts in the nascent field by by McAfee and Security & Defence Agenda, a defence think-tank. No metrics are involved in the study, which even McAfee admits is largely subjective. Brussels-based SDA based its conclusions on “in-depth interviews with some 80 world-leading policy-makers and cyber-security experts” …
Yes, the vexed question of global rules. Indeed it is proof they have scoured the corporate IT landscape for the talent to write a title only those paid to do so would read. And found it in Wallonia.
George Smith, a senior fellow at GlobalSecurity.org, believes the judge’s ruling, although “commensurate with the times we live in,” not only infringes on people’s rights, but also sets a very dangerous precedent, one that extends government intrusion well into a person’s private life …
“There is now a long history of governments using and misusing private digital materials against citizens,” Smith told SecurityNewsDaily. “Because this is a small-time criminal case is not an even half decent reason to attempt to nullify that.”
Presented with the hypothesis that an ecrypted hard drive might be analogous to a wall safe containing incriminating documents, Smith dismissed it.
“You can keep a lot of your life, or at least a very good description of your years of personal communications, hobbies, work, loves, vices, likes, dislikes and activities from start to finish, etc., on your hard disk and removable drives these days,” he said. “You can’t keep your life in a wall safe.”
For clarification, some law-and-order desire for a conviction in what amounts to a trivial criminal case, the defendant is accused of being a small town mortgage scam artist, is no reason to take chip away everyone’s right to privacy as enforced by personal encryption.
From time to time I like to point out, first-hand, how stilted the mainstream press is. Everyone now believes the system is rigged for a certain outcome but not everyone gets to regularly experience it.
Over the holidays I was buttonholed by two reporters wishing to do stories on cyberwar.
One was from a medium-sized newspaper in New Jersey. The other was a Wall Street reporter from Die Zeit, the big German weekly newspaper.
Both wanted to go over the matter of turning off the US remotely via cyberattack. In the case of Die Zeit’s reporter, it was the oft repeated idea that a cyberattack could destroy the US financial system that needed scrutiny.
In both cases I told the journalists these claims were well over ten years old. And these are assertions the sellers of the cyberwar story have always used because they get lots of attention and can be reliably counted upon to be passed on unskeptically simply by dint of delivery by authority.
The claims do not adhere to any reasonable standard of proof in the scientific sense. That is, extraordinary statements can be made in the absence of any extraordinary evidence to support them.
When taken over the history of the matter the reporters, at least on the phone, found my telling of it compelling. The Die Zeit reporter was interested because she had been covering Wall Street for many years and couldn’t figure out how any such thing could be done.
Wall Street is fiendishly complex.
In fact, she indicated, the American, and by extension, the world financial system, is now so complicated she doubted anyone on the inside even fully understood it.
So I asked her to tell me what proof she had been given that the US financial market could be destroyed by cyberattack. And there really wasn’t anything convincing to it, we seemed to agree.
There was, however, some mumbo jumbo about stealth or malicious hedge funds and such.
To which I wryly remarked something to the effect that that, in effect, was part of the industry’s action in the economic collapse.
Americans don’t feel the cyberattack on the US financial system story. They have, instead, lived through a time when the financial system attacked them, repeatedly. And it continues to do so.
After the holiday season interviews, which were long, no stories resulted.
Contrast this with the number of repetitive drivel pieces asserting the coming of some manner of cyberwar every day.
Having worked at a newspaper and written for an alternative news weekly I can tell you why this works the way it does.
The short version (a long version would take a couple book chapters) is this: Editors just don’t like stories that don’t deliver some claim of imminent catastrophe, delivered by argument from on hight.
But there is certainly a story in the hard fact that what I’ve described has been peddled so invariantly for so long. If the names have changed, simply because people have aged out of the endeavor — it’s been over a decade, the nature of the sources and predictions have remained static.
There is rock solid proof in the historical record. But it is a tale too complicated, lacking in a titillating sense of looming danger, and self-impeaching for most to tell.
Panetta: The reality is that there is the cyber capability to basically bring down our power grid to create … to paralyze our financial system in this country to virtually paralyze our country. And I think we have to be prepared not only to defend against that kind of attack but if necessary we are going to have to be prepared to be able to be aggressive when it comes to cyber efforts as well. We’ve got to develop the technology, the capability, we’ve got to be able to defend this country.
60 Minutes has also been the go-to place if you want to make an unchallenged claim on cyberwar. Here it is from 2010:
“Can you imagine your life without electric power?” Retired Admiral Mike McConnell asked correspondent Steve Kroft …
“If I were an attacker and I wanted to do strategic damage to the United States, I would either take the cold of winter or the heat of summer, I probably would sack electric power on the U.S. East Cost, maybe the West Coast, and attempt to cause a cascading effect. All of those things are in the art of the possible from a sophisticated attacker,” McConnell explained.
“Do you believe our adversaries have the capability of bringing down a power grid?” Kroft asked.
“I do,” McConnell replied.
The actual measurable reality is that this has been repeated thousands of times over the last fifteen years. In this it is like the story of electromagnetic pulse doom, which also features of hundreds of stories over the past decade asking you to imagine what your life would be like without electricity.
As a matter of observation, it’s the only thing the authority figure defense establishment salesmen and fearmongers can think of to get maximum attention. What’ll we do without power? We’ll all die! And it can happen now!
“China could launch a devastating computer-run sabotage operation by attacking U.S. oil refineries, many of which are grouped closely together in areas of Texas, New Jersey and California.”
“A [Chinese] computer attacker could penetrate the electronic ‘gate’ that controls refinery operations and cause fires or toxic chemical spills . . . ”
Same year, ITN Network from England
“In the City of London, if you were to hit two or three places – nor more than that -they would be able to turn the city off and that would stop the banking system and it would stop the share-trading system . . . Identifying the crazed, skilled cyber attacker is perhaps the single most difficult task that the cyber spooks face at the moment,” said Peter Sommer from the London School of Economics for ITN.
Same year, a State Department memo
“Assistant Secretary of State for Diplomatic Security David Carpenter told [an] audience of business security specialists that they must educate themselves about the mounting threats of cyber-crime. He said terrorists are constantly devising new ways ‘to cripple business, government, and infrastructure,’ and inventing new methods of ‘creative destruction.'”
1999, Richard Clarke, talking to the Associated Press:
“We could wake one morning and find a city, or a sector of the country, or the whole country have an electric power problem, a transportation problem or a telecommunication problem because there was a surprise attack using information warfare.”
1999, the Los Angeles Times
George Tenet, CIA director is quoted: “Potential targets are not only government computers but the lifelines we all take for granted — our power grids and our water and transportation systems.”
Another Pentagon wargame scenario, this time called Zenith Star, is invoked. The standard pro forma claims are issued: “enemy hackers supposedly had triggered blackouts . . . They paralyzed 911 systems . .
.
” . . . a team of NSA hackers proved that they could easily disable power, telephones and oil pipelines across the country as well as Pentagon warfighting capabilities.”
Richard Clarke, quoted in the New York Times, early 1999
“I’m talking about people shutting down a city’s electricity . . . shutting down 911 systems, shutting down telephone networks and transportation systems. You black out a city, people die. Black out lots of cities, lots of people die.”
Scripps News Service, 1999
While our information warriors are said to be the mightiest in the world, the Scripps Howard piece also reads: “A nation that would have no chance challenging America’s conventional or nuclear forces might well prevail in a computer attack.”
“Among the most sophisticated are India, Syria and Iran [anonymous] experts say.”
” . . . But a cyberattack on a country’s power grid, while militarily defensible, can cause more calamities than a missile and far more ‘collateral damage’ to innocents than it causes harm to an enemy’s forces or ability to fight.”
Occasionally, an official — long since gone, would gamely try to rephrase matters. From an obscure thing the Defense Information and Electronic Report, 1999.
“[The term Electronic Peal Harbor] connotes this ‘lights-out’ idea,” [Jeffrey Hunker, an official during the Clinton administration] said for Defense Information. “It tends to oversimplify the threat, which ranges from existential terrorism to overt acts to overthrow the military. . . . It trivializes the real [danger], which I think is much more than what’s been understood.”
Richard Clarke, again in the LA Times in 1999
“An enemy could systematically disrupt banking, transportation, utilities, finance, government functions and defense … It’s cheaper and easier than building a nuclear weapon.”
For NPR in 1999, GOP whacko REp. Curt Weldon, long since run out of Congress
“[Curt] Weldon says a successful hacker could disrupt civilian life, striking hospitals or train systems …
WELDON: “It’s not a matter of if America has an electronic Pearl Harbor, but when.”
The Christian Science Monitor, when it was still a real newspaper, and not a minor news website due to reader indifference, in 1999
“. . . Operation Eligible Receiver demonstrated the potential vulnerability of the U.S. government’s information systems. The National Security Agency hired 35 hackers to launch simulated attacks on the national information structure. The hackers obtained ‘root access’ – the highest level of control – in 36 of the government’s 40,000 networks.
“If the exercise had been real, the attackers would have been able to create power outages across Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, and New York.”
Federal Computer Week, a brigadier is interviewed, 1998
“A digital enemy can bypass the military and take down critical infrastructure — automated power plants, stock markets and transportation systems — and disable this nation without firing a shot . . . Call it a virtual Cold War . . .”
WIRED, May 1997
1. “We will have a cyber equivalent of Pearl Harbor at some point, and we do not want to wait for that wake-up call,” attributed to former U.S. Deputy Atty. General Jamie Gorelick.
2. “I-war can be the kind of neat, conceptually contained electronic Pearl Harbor scenario that Washington scenarists like — collapsing power grids, a stock market software bomb, an electromagnetic pulse that takes the phone system out.”
This article went on to get a credit in the last Bruce Willis Die Hard movie over a decade later.
Authoritative, accurate and long, it captures the establishment record on the matter.
It is the meme of turning the United States off via remote control. Again and again and again.
It is the only way to get unthinking people to accept how, maybe, enemy nations, bad actors, disgruntled insiders, anyone on the other side of the barricades of Fortress America, will take the country down without immediately getting bombed into rubble.
Now, it’s also more and more about protecting the 1 percent from the imagined predations of the paupers.
How else to interpret something like “to paralyze our financial system in this country …”
Nobody in the great mass that is not the 1 percent or in the service of the same cares about attacks on the American financial system. They do, on the other hand, wish our financial system would stop attacking them.
This is Leon Panetta doing the dance for the 1 percent, signaling the masters that he’s doing his best to see more swag comes their way in defense contracts for protecting cyberspace.
Stories and theories on demand, at your fingertips.
At the end of Drones over paupers: An Empire Merry Xmas, a syndication piece at GlobalSecurity.Org, I made the joke: How difficult is it to find someone to assert the Beast [the US stealth drone] was taken over by alleged Iranian cybergenius and tricked into landing [there], for a website, desperate for eyeballs, that used to be a newspaper that went out of business in the real world for lack of readers?
Guitar Player magazine has bowed to the inevitable. The issue now on newsstands features a cover story on affordable guitars for the rock n roller. With one exception, they are all made in China or Indonesia. The outlier is manufactured in Canada and is on the high end of the price range the story dictates, instruments under $500.
All the guitars are either licensed American designs, copies of US designs, or fundamentally based on old US models. Many of them are made under American brand names, companies which now manufacture more in China than they do domestically, where production is relegated to high end custom pieces for the artisan (read wealthy snob) economy.
The magazine is a bit tortured by the turn of events, as evidenced by loud assertions in the introductory ‘graphs on how every guitar was rigorously tested for quality in workmanship by its reviewers. But its editors now well know that the buying power of a great deal of its readership, being American, is either destroyed or seriously impaired. (No link — GP magazine does not put publish its features on the web.)
And the only instruments average readers can afford are those made in China.
There is a bit of delicious irony here. The Chamber of Commerce being a trade lobbying group which represents so many of the large multi-national corporations which have mercilessly downsized American jobs, for the sake of cheap labor in China.
The hacking story is not novel. There is nothing new here, just the usual revelation that Chinese spying operations are aimed at everything.
Although true, most of the quotes — taken from the usual officials — take on a laughable quality, considering how much has already been either carted off to China, or ceded to that country, simply for a corporate shareholder’s grasping benefit.
“I don’t think the Chamber of Commerce has anything worth stealing, but it’s part of a pattern of the Chinese stealing of everything they can, and that’s worrying,” Clarke said.
“You stack all of that up and I think there’s a case to be made that this may be the greatest transfer of wealth through theft and piracy in the history of the world and we are on the losing end of it,” said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island.
“This is a national, long-term strategic threat to the United States of America. This is an issue where a failure is not an option,” said Robert Bryant at the National Counterintelligence Executive.
National long-term strategic threat. The greatest transfer of wealth in history. The sound you can’t hear in cyberspace is DD’s loud horselaugh when reading the pompous piffle of miscellaneous hypocrites and shoeshine boys.
Nice drink, not made in China. I heard about it from the famous cyberwar plutocrat.
A damaging, fast-spreading computer bug forced an Atlanta-area hospital system to shut its doors for nearly three days last week and divert ambulances to other facilities.
Gwinnett Medical Center’s two campuses, in Lawrenceville and Duluth, Ga., were forced to declare “total diversion” status and turn away all but extreme trauma …
[Malware] affected connectivity only, and did not compromise medical records or affect patient care “in any way, shape or form.”
What happens when power fails due to heavy rains, high wind or hurricane? Possibly, some resources are maintained through limited emergency generator back-up power.
A hospital is not expected to cease operation or turn away patients in such emergencies.
Chalk some of this up to bad infrastructure, poor staffing and unwise decision-making and choices when the transition to networked services was made.
The bedrock of the practice of medicine and keeping people alive is in the real world, not the virtual. There’s a need to look for better help when failure in the virtual takes your legs out from under you more than momentarily.
