Cyber Warfare

Pipeline to nowhere

Featured image Bloomberg News reported yesterday that Colonial Pipeline paid nearly $5 million to Eastern European hackers last week. Bloomberg’s story contradicted reports earlier this week that the company had no intention of paying an extortion fee to help restore the country’s largest fuel pipeline (“according to two people familiar with the transaction”): The company paid the hefty ransom in difficult-to-trace cryptocurrency within hours after the attack, underscoring the immense pressure faced »

Cyber War vs. Russia: Did We Or Didn’t We?

Featured image The New York Times reported yesterday, in an anonymously sourced article attributed to “current and former national security officials,” that the U.S. has planted malware designed to attack power plants and other infrastructure into Russia’s power grid: The United States is stepping up digital incursions into Russia’s electric power grid in a warning to President Vladimir V. Putin and a demonstration of how the Trump administration is using new authorities »

Ishmael Jones: Spy versus spy

Featured image Ishmael Jones is the pseudonymous former CIA case officer and author of The Human Factor: Inside the CIA’s Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture. He has forwarded his comments on certain aspects of the CIA’s vulnerability. He advises that his comments have been reviewed and approved by the CIA’s publications review board. Mr. Jones writes: CIA secrets were once typed on paper and stored in safes. Even the typewriter ribbons were removed at »

World Cyber War I?

Featured image This is by far the most important news story of the day, but it seems to have been buried beneath an avalanche of James Comey coverage: Dozens of countries hit by huge cyberextortion attack: Dozens of countries were hit with a huge cyberextortion attack Friday that locked up computers and held users’ files for ransom at a multitude of hospitals, companies and government agencies. It was believed to the biggest »

The Case For Russian Hacking

Featured image I wrote here, here and here about the Obama administration’s two reports that purport to show that the DNC’s email system was penetrated by Russian intelligence. (For reasons about which we can only speculate, they don’t talk about the intrusion into the email account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, John Podesta.) I concluded that those reports completely failed to make the case that the Russians were behind the DNC hack. »