‘Tis the weekend, so its time to go grocery shopping. Realistically, there is very little I need from grocery shopping these days…the house is full of food. I t ink I picked up some butter and that was really about it. :::shrug::: Food is money in the bank.
Speaking of money, I saw that the pipeline fiasco back east wound up with people getting paid off after all. Wanna bet that the oil company will quietly either get a $5m tax deduction or .gov quietly paid the $5m ransom for them to prevent major chaos? Either way, a buncha guys in a basement in Russia just inspired everyone on the planet to get into the hack-the-infrastructure business.
The days of having to cripple a country by carpet bombing and boots-on-the-ground are waning. A buncha guys in the Utah desert can fly RC planes over Iran, and a buncha basement dwellers in Minsk can cut off a fuel pipeline in the US. Push-button warfare indeed.
You know the saying about how amateurs talk tactics but professionals talk logistics? That tells you that logistics is just as paramount as everything else…heck, even Napoleon agreed when he famously stated that an army marches on it’s stomach. The Germans tried it WW2 by torpedoing every supply convoy it could find.You don’t have to get your hands terribly bloody to throw a country into turmoil these days…you just cutoff the pipeline valve controls, lock the floodgates open, turn all the traffic lights to green, shutoff all the runway lights, and power down all the telecommunications relays.
I suspect we’re going to experience more of that sort of thing although we probably won’t hear about much of it. Heck, for all I know we’ve experienced it a buncha times recently and it was dismissed in the media as something else. After all, it doesn’t do the .gov any good for the people to know just how vulnerable the systems really are. They might wana know why their tax money isn’t going towards keeping things secure.
So, the lesson here is that when people can bloodlessly shut down a system from halfway across the planet, with minimal risk to yourself, and a potentially huge payday, you’re going to see a lot more of that sort of thing. So..be prepared for it. It took only a couple days for people to turn into savages fighting in gas lines. Why be there if you don’t have to be? Store enough fuel to meet your needs for at least a couple weeks. I keep about two months worth of gasoline on hand, based on my average usage.
But, most importantly, this is a harbinger of things to come. Compromised infrastructure that leads to calls for .gov to ‘do something’ and the next thing you know Uncle Sam is keeping his thumb down even tighter on ‘public services’.
The news just gets more and more interesting, doesnt it?
Westrock, a huge packaging company had a ransomware attack over the winter, has affected, and its after effects, still are slowing down food, and other supplies accross the nation.
Didya catch that crack in a steel beam in the I-40 bridge across the Mississippi River? The inspector sounded almost panicked that the bridge be shut down NOW. Stories say itll be months as best before the bridge reopens. And that is a MAJOR transportation artery. If we didnt have the I-55 bridge to the south, i hate to think what living in that area would be like.
More of that kind of thing to come as well, i suspect.
I could be there with a welder,steel and have a temporary patch on that thing in a matter of hours. I know a bridge construction outfit that could build the permanent repair in a few weeks(depending on how much it is needed$$$). The hold up is strictly for control and to destroy. Isnt this one of Obamas’ shovel ready Hopium projects?
Nothing stored or run in the virtual world is safe. My default is to purchase things that are hardcopy, not wifi compatible. Not electronic. Nothing that only works because it has an integrated circuit burned onto a chip will last. If you can’t imagine life without it, it better not require RAM or internet connectivity. We’re on a trajectory where we are all going to go back to living like it was 1870, but with an awareness of the danger that high tech adds to the mix. Because if we don’t, our enemies are going to know how to leverage that dependency on technology into a fatal weakness. Someone like Armenia, finding itself on the short end of that technology vector, is going to decide to EMP the whole world, and reset the chess board.
What if the next ransomware attack wasn’t for $$$.
“You want the pipeline / railroad / shipping port back?…Move that carrier group out of the south China sea and back to San Diego. ”
I can see the “payment” being the movement of militarily assets, release of people or information, statements and actions that reflect a change in posture.
Stored food, fuel, and other consumables is insulation from these disruptions we all can see will come.
The internet security expert Kaspersky has stated it was not from Russia but likely a .gov group (name alphabet agency here) looking for a mostly nonviolent way to promote electric cars.
Waitasec…lemme Google real fast… “Kaspersky Lab is a Russian multinational cybersecurity and anti-virus provider headquartered in Moscow, Russia and operated by a holding company in the United Kingdom.”
So the Russian internet security expert says it isnt the Russians. Thats a bit…neat.
the $5 million will be logged as a business expense then passed on to the American consumer.
This re-inforces my belief that the people running the show are idiots, whether they are a R or a D, most people don’t have a clue about how to handle real life, which is why they are fist fighting over plastic bags of gasoline.
Mad Max, here we come.
One counter to ransomware that hasn’t been tried yet…an international agreement that it constitutes a threat to national security. When we identify bad guys, either the host country (involved or not) either agrees to address them with military force of looks aside as we use missiles or SEAL teams to put them out of business. Take the low risk out of ransomware.
That may work with some little shithole. You tell that to Putin or Xi and they will laugh at you first and then tell you to fuck off.
The simple fact is that a great deal of the infrastructure of our country is vulnerable to hacking.. The pipeline was controlled by people who were working from home during the pandemic, and they were using the internet to control it. “What could possibly go wrong???” Even the most abject retard on the planet knows that anything connected to the internet is potentially vulnerable to hacking.
Beyond pipelines, add to the list of the vulnerable aspects of modern society the national power grid. Think of the absolute chaos that would result if the Eastern, Western, or Texas Power Grids went down for weeks or more. (FYI, the Texas Power Grid was only seconds away from going down during the February freeze that rocked Texas. If it had gone down, Texans would have been without power for weeks.)
For years, industry observers have pointed that, it is highly likely that government-sponsored Russian and Chinese hackers have embedded sleeper viruses that can be activated at anytime so as to bring down our nation’s power grid. (The good news is that we have likely done the same to them.) Sooner or later, it is likely that the chickens will come home to roost.
Only Sheeple ignore threats like this in their daily lives and live as if nothing can ever disturb their world of prancing unicorns and majestic rainbows. And, when a mega-event happens, they are amazed, shocked, and unprepared to deal with the results.
One last thought, was it simply a criminal element that took down the pipeline? Or was it a criminal element with tacit government approval, such as with English pirates such as Sir Francis Drake who preyed on the Spanish Empire? If it became known that Russian tolerated/supported hackers were involved as proxies for Putin’s government, Biden would have been forced to do something. If so, the situation would have gotten much uglier.
I don’t think that we should rule out the possibility of “plausible deniability” here.
You’re thinking like it was all up and up. Far as we know it was all BS. Remember all solar businesses that were infrastructure bailouts. Smoke and mirrors.
Hardening internet-connected critical infrastructure is a great idea, but one thing I learned on my first day working at the (then) largest, most-respected software company in the world, was that there’s no software that’s bug free – just the ones that haven’t been found yet – and even the devices that are (supposedly) air-gapped can be gotten to – as with the centrifuges in Iran.
I’ve never regretted changing my life around so that I can do 100% of my needed getting around by bicycling or walking. Still have the car for getting out of town on the weekend or hauling big things, but I’ll never go back to being dependent on it.
It wasnt russia or china, sorry folks but this constant incessant drum beating is the signs of a collapsing empire, nothing more.
Been away a while, been meaning to reply. Here it is:
Kurt
Rudyard Kipling
Dane-Geld
It is always a temptation to an armed and agile nation
To call upon a neighbour and to say: —
“We invaded you last night–we are quite prepared to fight,
Unless you pay us cash to go away.”
And that is called asking for Dane-geld,
And the people who ask it explain
That you’ve only to pay ’em the Dane-geld
And then you’ll get rid of the Dane!
It is always a temptation for a rich and lazy nation,
To puff and look important and to say: —
“Though we know we should defeat you, we have not the time to meet you.
We will therefore pay you cash to go away.”
And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we’ve proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.
It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any nation,
For fear they should succumb and go astray;
So when you are requested to pay up or be molested,
You will find it better policy to say: —
“We never pay any-one Dane-geld,
No matter how trifling the cost;
For the end of that game is oppression and shame,
And the nation that pays it is lost!”