Tag Archives: Cybersecurity

It’s About the Rush

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Watters had spent his entire career working for money. Hackers, McManus explained, aren’t in it for money. At least, not in the beginning. They are in it for the rush, the one that comes with accessing information never meant to be seen. Some do it for power, knowledge, free speech, anarchy, human rights, “the lulz,” privacy, piracy, the puzzle, belonging, connection, or chemistry, but most do it out of pure curiosity. The common thread is that they just can’t help themselves. At their core, hackers are just natural tinkerers. They can’t see a system and not want to break it down to its very last bit, see where it takes them, and then build it back up for some alternate use. Where Watters saw a computer, a machine, a tool, McManus saw a portal.

–This is How They Tell Me The World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race, Nicole Perlroth

World’s Largest Attack Surface

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What had saved Ukraine is precisely what made the United States the most vulnerable nation on earth. Ukraine wasn’t fully automated. In the race to plug everything into the internet, the country was far behind. The tsunami known as the Internet of Things, which had consumed Americans for the better part of the past decade, had still not washed up in Ukraine. The nation’s nuclear stations, hospitals, chemical plants, oil refineries, gas and oil pipelines, factories, farms, cities, cars, traffic lights, homes, thermostats, lightbulbs, refrigerators, stoves, baby monitors, pacemakers, and insulin pumps were not yet “web-enabled.”

In the United States, though, convenience was everything; it still is. We were plugging anything we could into the internet, at a rate of 127 devices a second. We had bought into Silicon Valley’s promise of a frictionless society. There wasn’t a single area of our lives that wasn’t touched by the web. We could now control our entire lives, economy, and grid via a remote web control. And we had never paused to think that, along the way, we were creating the world’s largest attack surface.

–This is How They Tell Me The World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race, Nicole Perlroth

Cyberwar Power Move

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There was no financial profit to be gleaned from turning off the power. It was a political hit job. In the months that followed, security researchers confirmed as much. They traced the attack back to a well-known Russian intelligence unit and made their motives known. The attack was designed to remind Ukrainians that their government was weak, that Russia was strong that Putin’s digital forces were so deep into Ukraine’s every digital nook and cranny that Russia could turn the lights off at will. And just in case that message wasn’t clear, the same Russian hackers followed up one year later, turning off Ukraine’s power again in December 2016. Only this time they shut off heat and power to the nation’s heart—Kyiv—in a display of nerve and skill that made even Russia’s counterparts at the National Security Agency headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, wince.

–This is How They Tell Me The World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race, Nicole Perlroth