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U.S. Escalates Online Attacks on Russia’s Power Grid

nytimes.com

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Re: U.S. Escalates Online Attacks on Russia’s Power Grid

#31

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

_iyig wrote: post #23

“So far, there is no evidence that the United States has actually turned off the power in any of the efforts to establish what American officials call a “persistent presence” inside Russian networks, just as the Russians have not turned off power in the United States.” The NYT decision to frame these efforts as “attacks” rather than “infiltration” is certainly an interesting one. In essence, the U.S. has built a (dig…

Since they're actively planting stuff in their systems, I consider calling it an attack appropriate.

That's not "testing nukes in your own desert", that is "sneaking into someone's factories and planting bombs", if we're looking for an analogy.

And I'm surprised that this is openly admitted by the US, and tolerated by both sides, instead of being treated as an act of war.

Re: U.S. Escalates Online Attacks on Russia’s Power Grid

#32

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

dang wrote: post #4
yasp wrote: post #2

Despite having received 18 votes in 5 hours and while never having advanced beyond page 3 on the list of trending links (position #67 currently), this piece trails behind another Times piece, "Why don't more American men take paternity leave?", which is on page 2 (position #45 currently), and which has received only 6 votes in the span of 8 hours. WTF

It got a software penalty, probably correctly, because this topic is unfortunately more likely to lead nationalistic flamewar than thoughtful discussion. But let's try taking the penalty off and seeing. By the way, you can't derive story rank from points and submission time—HN's system is more complex than that. That's all that "WTF" means here.

> It got a software penalty

In other words, HN is not ranking posts by votes, but by some (presumably handcrafted) algorithm that shapes which topics are more likely to make it to the front page. TIL.

Re: U.S. Escalates Online Attacks on Russia’s Power Grid

#33

Post by techntoke »

m0zg wrote: post #13

Article provides zero evidence or any other kind of corroboration to the claims made. NYT is fake news.

You know how American press releases go lately. Reminds me of the efforts leading up to the Iraq war. Or the "deal" that was made with Mexico that is basically a PR effort with little to no actual action. Gotta keep those ratings as high as possible.

Re: U.S. Escalates Online Attacks on Russia’s Power Grid

#34

Post by archy_ »

solarkraft wrote: post #30
Phlarp wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is about nation state adversaries. There should be no illusions that they laugh at people who think they are safe behind air gaps and routinely cross them. Often both infiltrating and exfiltrating data.

Would you prefer systems being very easy to attack or very hard?

You can have easy to administer systems that are also secure. It's not mutually exclusive.

Re: U.S. Escalates Online Attacks on Russia’s Power Grid

#35

Post by zzzcpan »

pmoriarty wrote: post #8

"For the past year, energy companies in the United States and oil and gas operators across North America discovered their networks had been examined by the same Russian hackers who successfully dismantled the safety systems in 2017 at Petro Rabigh, a Saudi petrochemical plant and oil refinery." Why are these systems even connected to the internet? Decades ago, creating such connections might have been a forgivable ov…

I'm not sure about the US, but in Russia and, well, in all former Soviet states energy systems are not actually connected to the internet and where there is automation it can all fallback to manual operations, so they can survive cyber attacks like nothing happened (almost, as figuring things out and communications cost some time).

Re: U.S. Escalates Online Attacks on Russia’s Power Grid

#36

Post by realsensorfu »

pmoriarty wrote: post #8

"For the past year, energy companies in the United States and oil and gas operators across North America discovered their networks had been examined by the same Russian hackers who successfully dismantled the safety systems in 2017 at Petro Rabigh, a Saudi petrochemical plant and oil refinery." Why are these systems even connected to the internet? Decades ago, creating such connections might have been a forgivable ov…

Shameless plug: I work for a startup ( https://www.sensorfu.com/ ) that helps utilities and industrial companies to solve that exact problem of keeping their control | ICS networks closed and isolated from internet.

Even larger utilities often have a rather small IT teams that are tasked with everything from keeping things running to change management, network design and architecture. And whether it is lack of time to focus on making the right things, or lack of time to even learn the latest right things, mistakes happen, all the time. And even when 'perfectly' implemented, it is far too often that we see that some one just decided that it's ok to run a cable from control room to open internet to make those night shifts a little less boring.

Re: U.S. Escalates Online Attacks on Russia’s Power Grid

#37

Post by dang »

kindof-bullshit wrote: post #27
dang wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It got a software penalty, probably correctly, because this topic is unfortunately more likely to lead nationalistic flamewar than thoughtful discussion. But let's try taking the penalty off and seeing. By the way, you can't derive story rank from points and submission time—HN's system is more complex than that. That's all that "WTF" means here.

A "software" penalty. Okay, Dan. Why don't you just come out and say someone modded it, rather than hide behind the veil of some dubious natural language processing or ratio analysis. That's like blaming the dog for a fart. The truth is that everyone operating HN would rather keep users in the dark about how and why stories land where they do. The idea being that if we could predict what the software might do, we'd t…

I didn't say someone modded it because someone didn't mod it—unless you consider writing code modding, which is not how most of us use those words.

When the software does a thing I say the software did it. When moderators do a thing I say moderators did it. Who knew that was controversial?

Re: U.S. Escalates Online Attacks on Russia’s Power Grid

#38

Post by jacquesm »

holoduke wrote: post #7
true_tuna wrote: post #6

Holy crap. This is huge news. Isn’t a cyber attack on critical infrastructure kind of an act of war? I’m not sure how wise this course of action is.

It's part of a larger game these nations are playing. There will not be a war between Russia and the US. Not with China who is ultimately the enemy of both Russia and the US. These incidents are meant to keep each other awake.

It sets the stage for a false flag operation where the Chinese disable Russia's power infrastructure making it look like it was America.

Re: U.S. Escalates Online Attacks on Russia’s Power Grid

#39

Post by mogadsheu »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #31
_iyig wrote: post #23

“So far, there is no evidence that the United States has actually turned off the power in any of the efforts to establish what American officials call a “persistent presence” inside Russian networks, just as the Russians have not turned off power in the United States.” The NYT decision to frame these efforts as “attacks” rather than “infiltration” is certainly an interesting one. In essence, the U.S. has built a (dig…

Since they're actively planting stuff in their systems, I consider calling it an attack appropriate. That's not "testing nukes in your own desert", that is "sneaking into someone's factories and planting bombs", if we're looking for an analogy. And I'm surprised that this is openly admitted by the US, and tolerated by both sides, instead of being treated as an act of war.

Maybe they’re both more concerned with attacks from terrorist groups than from each other.

The analogy would be one guy telling a colleague that his fly is down before a client meeting. They both might want the same position but an unrecognized failure would make them both look bad.

Re: U.S. Escalates Online Attacks on Russia’s Power Grid

#40

Post by pessimizer »

m0zg wrote: post #13

Article provides zero evidence or any other kind of corroboration to the claims made. NYT is fake news.

Less fake news than an openly credulous outlet for strategic US intelligence agency leaks attributed to "anonymous government officials."
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