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US passes emergency waiver over fuel pipeline cyber-attack

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Re: US passes emergency waiver over fuel pipeline cyber-attack

#51

So, a very limited state of emergency which allows fuel that is ordinarily piped to be transported by truck. Ancillarily, It's not evident this cyberattack actually compromised the industrial controls, but rather trashed the administrative system controlling the controls.

It's interesting to consider the human link between the admin systems and industrial control systems here. If we assume the controls are on an airgapped network, the attackers, in some sense, jumped the airgap and shutdown the pipeline.

Obviously not as bad as an actual compromise of the control systems though, which presumably could cause leaks, explosions, etc.

Re: US passes emergency waiver over fuel pipeline cyber-attack

#52
post #25

The government is incompetent, especially when it comes to cybersecurity. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Who was it again that has the most effective intelligence community and military in the world?

In terms of actual execution, definitely not America!

Re: US passes emergency waiver over fuel pipeline cyber-attack

#53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who was it again that has the most effective intelligence community and military in the world?

Pound for pound I'd say Israel. In absolute terms I'm pretty sure China has us at sea and in cyber so... Not the US

Pretty sure china doesn't have the oceans - might want to check up on your stats.

Re: US passes emergency waiver over fuel pipeline cyber-attack

#54
post #25

The government is incompetent, especially when it comes to cybersecurity. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Who was it again that has the most effective intelligence community and military in the world?

Intelligence I'd say probably Russia right? They've made America look quite incompetent the past decade or so. Military I'd say America although I don't think SEAL team 6 is going to be hunting down these attackers

Re: US passes emergency waiver over fuel pipeline cyber-attack

#55
post #8

Colonial Pipeline precisely does keep it's control network disconnected from the internet - the only thing that was ransomwared is their corporate network. They shut the pipelines down voluntarily to prevent further spread.

I saw Robert Lee of Dragos giving an opinion on that here https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/knowns-unknowns-abou... but did they confirm that officially?

>Colonial has not given any public indication as to the reach of the ransomware outbreak, but Robert M. Lee, chief executive of cybersecurity firm Dragos, said he believed Colonial's operations network was shut down proactively "to make sure that nothing spread into those systems."

Re: US passes emergency waiver over fuel pipeline cyber-attack

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only a few universities are teaching this stuff right now. In any case: EVM is "Ethereum Virtual Machine", a similar concept to the JVM "Java Virtual Machine". EVMs are one the most common technology for deployment of arbitrary execution within distributed networks. These kinds of functions and applications are colloquially called smart contracts. The biggest distributed network with this technology being simply call…

Thank you for the elaboration. Your humble willingness to do so is much appreciated.

You're welcome!

One of the highest growth areas and highly demanded is in building bridges for assets to move between blockchains. Particularly Liquidity Pool shares and other asset backed derivatives. If you would like to apply yourself here. The market-based rewards are direct, swift, and very high.

More than what FAANG pays their E5's and L5's.

Re: US passes emergency waiver over fuel pipeline cyber-attack

#57

Breaking: U.S. government is inept at carrying out procedures which are standard in the technology industry, including the proper safeguarding of important tools & data, despite a budget larger than any other entity on earth. Not Breaking: Citizens’ disappointment in the aforementioned, particularly given their direct contribution to said budget. The Unsaid: Much of this will not change, unless incentives are realign…

> Breaking: U.S. government is inept at carrying out procedures which are standard in the technology industry, including the proper safeguarding of important tools & data, despite a budget larger than any other entity on earth.

I'm not sure what technology industry you are in, but in the one I'm in software engineers are fooled by phishing attacks extremely consistently, people routinely expose critical systems and devices to the internet, developers often expose databases with insecure defaults to the internet over well-known ports, customer data gets stolen on a regular basis, etc., etc., etc. Regardless of how one feels about the government, I don't think the average technology company does any better when it comes to securing its own infrastructure.

Re: US passes emergency waiver over fuel pipeline cyber-attack

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No we should not. We should hunt down those individuals that are responsible but if we get into this tit for tat escalation pattern it might end poorly for all parties involved.

Yes we should. There is no justification for why we meekly let them have at it cyberspace. It should be pain for pain. Russians will never learn until they feel pain.

I like the concept of holding Russia (as with any country) responsible assuming they are, but your reply didn’t address the escalating pattern of tit for tat, and how to deal with that.

Re: US passes emergency waiver over fuel pipeline cyber-attack

#59

I like how they are charging 10% more if you pay with Bitcoin than with Monero. I think commerce would greatly improve if other networks had Tor clients, especially because of the stablecoin and private stablecoin availability as of this year. All EVMs as well as Tendermint networks have no out of the box solutions for Tor nodes and connectivity. But they both have ways for ERC20 tokens to have a great degree of priv…

probably because btc is epxpensive and hard to launder

Yes, it is nice to see the market adjusting.

There are only a few cryptocurrency networks with robust Tor infrastructure for now. There should be more but the stewards haven't prioritized it, for the most part many nodes and wallets for other networks are UDP, which is a major hurdle as Tor requires TCP exclusively. Bitcoin and Monero do not have this limitation, but Monero is the only private by default one and has a large mixture set to stay easily obfuscated.

Re: US passes emergency waiver over fuel pipeline cyber-attack

#60

False flag in the run up to a severe regulatory clamp down. Won't be the first or the last.

Regulatory clamp down as in higher regulations that companies must have good computer security?

I think it's already potentially illegal to pay a ransom. Maybe governments could increase those penalties and make it more clearly illegal.

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