Wednesday, December 04, 2019

Should I be frightened?

I just finished a review of "Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin’s Most Dangerous Hackers" by Andy Greenberg in the NY Review of Books. Frankly, I am frightened. The book recounts a number of successful cyberattacks, many of which I had not heard about. Many of the attacks were on industrial control systems, such as those used for health care, transportation, agriculture, defense, infrastructure.

Did you know that from 2011 to 2013 Iranian hackers broke into the servers of banks and financial firms, including JPMorgan Chase, American Express, and Wells Fargo, and besieged them for 144 days? Or in 2017 Russian hackers found their way into the systems of one hundred American nuclear and other power plants. Another hacking group disabled the safety controls at a Saudi Arabian oil refinery. 

Russian hackers have gone after ex-Russian territories. In 2007 Estonia hit with a cyberattack that shuttered media, banking, and government services over twenty-two days. Georgia was hit with a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack that took down media outlets and military command centers. In 2015, it was a Kiev-based television company plus the airport and railroads, the power grid so that there was no heat, no transportation, no way to get money or use a credit card, little food.

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