*Except for
possibly multiple successful hacks in 2017 and 2018. The Director of National
Intelligence’s 2019 Worldwide
Threat Assessment (based on intelligence gathered by the FBI and CIA) has this
paragraph (p. 6):
Russia has the ability to execute cyber
attacks in the United States that generate localized, temporary disruptive
effects on critical infrastructure—such as disrupting an electrical distribution
network for at least a few hours—similar to those demonstrated in Ukraine in
2015 and 2016. Moscow is mapping our critical infrastructure with the long-term
goal of being able to cause substantial damage.
The
undisputable implication of this statement is that Russian hackers penetrated
the control centers of multiple electric utilities and planted malware that
could cause an outage. When this report was released, many cyber professionals
in or knowledgeable of the electric power industry believed this conclusion to
be wrong. However, since no investigation
was conducted at the time, six years later there is still no evidence that the
FBI's and CIA’s statements in that report were wrong.
Pretty sad,
isn’t it? You never can erase an asterisk from your record. Just ask Barry Bonds and Sammy Sosa.
Any opinions expressed in this blog post are strictly mine
and are not necessarily shared by any of the clients of Tom Alrich LLC.
If you would like to comment on what you have read here, I
would love to hear from you. Please email me at tom@tomalrich.com.
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