March 7, 2023 - Epoch Times
17:17
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| When most people, and I include myself in that list as well, when we think about the cybersecurity threats that are facing our country, we often think about things like bank accounts and our social security numbers getting stolen and things like that, things isolated to the digital realm. | |
| However, more and more, it's become clear that cyberattacks are actual, real, physical threats that can cause physical harm, because they have the potential to target our real-world infrastructure. | |
| For instance, back in 2001, there was a hacker over in Australia who accessed a computerized waste management system, and he proceeded to dump sewage into local parks and into local rivers. | |
| Then, in 2007, there was a piece of malware called Stuxnet, which was most likely developed by the US and Israel, which destroyed several uranium centrifuges over in Iran. | |
| Basically, this piece of malware, once it got into the system, made the centrifuges spin so fast that they just lost control and exploded. | |
| Then, in 2008, there was a hacker over in Poland who was able to break into the computer system and forcibly redirect, as well as to derail several trains, which resulted in many people getting injured. | |
| Then, in 2013, there was a cyberattack on a hydroelectric dam over in New York State, which was likely carried out by Iran. | |
| That cyberattack could have resulted in the dam flooding a nearby town, and even though that didn't actually happen, it was well within the realm of possibility. | |
| Then, in 2014, there was a phishing attack that hackers used to gain the login credentials of a German steel mill, and once they got into that system, the hackers disrupted the control systems, shut down parts of the steel mill, which ultimately resulted in serious damage to the mill's blast furnace. | |
| Then, in 2016, Russian hackers broke into the power grid of Ukraine, and they caused massive blackouts as well as power outages throughout the entirety of the country, and that took place during the freezing winter months. | |
| Then, in 2021, there was a cyberattack against a water treatment facility over in the state of Florida. | |
| A hacker was able to somehow gain access to the system, and they contaminated the local drinking water by changing the amount of chemicals that were being added to it. | |
| Fortunately, nobody was poisoned in that incident, but that was only because there were sensors in place which detected the contamination before the water was actually made public to the rest of the community. | |
| And then, of course, you likely have heard about what happened last year with the Colonial Pipeline. | |
| That was when a cyberattack shut down one of the largest pipelines in all of America, and effectively, it cut off most of the oil and gas that was flowing to the eastern and southeastern part of the country. | |
| Now, as a response to that Colonial Pipeline attack, You might remember that right after the attack, Joe Biden actually spoke with Vladimir Putin while they were together over in Geneva. | |
| And during that meeting, Joe Biden handed Putin a list of 16 critical infrastructure entities that were off-limits to Russian hackers. | |
| Now, it's kind of odd indeed that he would give that kind of a list to your enemy, but that's what actually happened. | |
| And the entities on that list, they included services related to things like energy, water, emergency services, healthcare, things like chemical, nuclear, as well as hydroelectric dams, and so on and so forth. | |
| That one month after giving that list to Putin, Joe Biden gave an official address to the nation wherein he warned America of an impending Russian cybersecurity attack that was supposedly on the horizon, something which he actually said might trigger a shooting war. | |
| Take a listen. | |
| Increasingly we're able to cause damage and disruption in the real world. | |
| I can't guarantee this, and you're as informed as I am. | |
| But I think it's more likely we're going to end up as — well, if we end up in a war, a real shooting war, with a major power, it's going to be as a consequence of a cyber breach — of great consequence. | |
| And it's increasing exponentially, the capabilities. | |
| And the threats and rhetoric surrounding cyber warfare have only increased dramatically ever since the Ukraine-Russia war began back in February of last year. | |
| The Russian government has put out multiple statements saying that they are willing and able to launch cyber attacks against the U.S. And on the flip side, the White House has on multiple occasions throughout the last year put out statements warning the country of an imminent Russian cyber attack, which fortunately up until today has yet to come to fruition. | |
| Alright, there was one thing that I forgot to mention during the in-studio filming of that episode, and that is even prior to the Ukraine-Russia war, Russian hackers were getting quite creative with their attacks. | |
| One example was how they used a piece of malware that they attached to tax software. | |
| Basically, in Ukraine, this was a popular piece of software that people used to file their taxes, and Russian hackers infected it with a piece of malware, and then it spread to more and more computers. | |
| And in the end, what basically happened was that 10% of all Ukrainian computers had all their data wiped out because of this malware. | |
| That included hospitals, ATM and bank machines, basically wiped out 10% of computer data in the country. | |
| And then, once the war actually began, These attacks only escalated further. | |
| There was a press conference just a few days ago, wherein the Ukrainians said that in the year 2022, there were over 2000 cyber attacks that were attributable to the Russians on Ukrainian soil. | |
| And so obviously they're escalating that line of attack in Ukraine. | |
| And the fear is that they will escalate it further here in the U.S. as well. | |
| However, that is generally the backstory for this document right here, which came from the White House and was published about three days ago. | |
| It is a policy document put out by the Biden administration laying out the cybersecurity threats to this country, how those threats have been addressed thus far, as well as what the administration plans to do in addressing those threats moving forward within the next coming year. | |
| And so, in order to dissect this document and assess whether the strategies that it contains will actually protect this country effectively, I took the opportunity to sit down and speak with Congressman Mark Green. | |
| He's a Republican from the state of Tennessee, and currently he's serving as the chairman for the House Committee on Homeland Security. | |
| And so smash those like and subscribe buttons and take a listen. | |
| So yesterday you put out a statement regarding the Biden administration's new cybersecurity strategy, a policy document that came out. | |
| So let's dissect that a little bit. | |
| To start with, can you sort of set the stage for the audience on what the cybersecurity threat to this country is right now? | |
| Absolutely. | |
| We have a massive cybersecurity threat. | |
| I call it our fourth border. | |
| First border, you know, Canada. | |
| Southwest border, second border. | |
| The Caribbean is actually considered our third border. | |
| And then our fourth border, I would call our cyber border. | |
| And we have massive attacks. | |
| The SolarWinds attack was huge cost. | |
| Between government and the private sector, about $100 billion, according to Forbes magazine. | |
| Of course, everyone remembers the colonial pipeline. | |
| If you're in the Southwest, you Or Southeast, you couldn't get, you know, gasoline. | |
| So, look, it's bad. | |
| China is about 60% of those. | |
| There's a big, the more lethal ones seem to come from Russia. | |
| So there are state actors. | |
| There are also non-state actors that threaten not only business, but they threaten our government. | |
| So it's a huge deal, and we're at risk. | |
| So there's lots to do. | |
| Actually, you mentioned the colonial pipeline. | |
| That's something I really want to highlight for the viewers at home because even myself, when I used to think of cybersecurity, it's like, oh, my bank account statement or something like that. | |
| But more and more, it's become, ever since what happened in Iran when Israel had that little virus where they turned the centrifuges so much that it actually, well, Israel supposedly, someone did it. | |
| But these cybersecurity threats are becoming more and more physical threats, right? | |
| Where pipelines can get turned off. | |
| Water plants can actually have their filters turned off, right? | |
| Things like this. | |
| Yeah, dams can be opened. | |
| They had a computer that they found ransomware on that was going to control a dam in, I think it was Connecticut or something like that, and opened the floodgates, basically, which would have drowned Americans. | |
| So there is a physical threat to the people of America from a cyberattack. | |
| It's not just something that happens in cyberspace. | |
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| And then let's head on back to the studio. | |
| So who are the biggest threats to this country in this space? | |
| I mean, I can imagine China, Russia, Iran being the obvious choices. | |
| North Korea would be the other one to add to the list. | |
| So North Korea did the Sony hack, you may recall, a decade or so ago. | |
| Really messed up a lot of people's lives. | |
| They released emails, things like that. | |
| And I think there was one suicide from that. | |
| I mean, it just... | |
| So North Korea, Iran, Russia, and China... | |
| The normal actors, America haters. | |
| It's interesting you say North Korea, because I still think of North Korea as like, they have only, I think, 12 websites available to the public, so I don't even think of them as having that kind of hacking capability. | |
| They have extensive cyber capability. | |
| What about non-state actors? | |
| What about just hacking groups? | |
| Are you seeing more of those come into play? | |
| Yeah, so the question is, are they really non-state actors, right? | |
| Some of the criminals are in Russia. | |
| And we know that they operate at the permission of the Kremlin. | |
| So there's the question of really how non-state are those non-state actors. | |
| But yes, there are groups, there are just pure criminals who use cyber to steal money. | |
| And the ransomware stuff is just a for-profit criminal enterprise. | |
| So yeah, I mean, that's who's out there. | |
| Inside of the Homeland Security Committee, have you guys seen any evidence regarding what's been happening with the FAA and other similar agencies around the world recently where they seem to have these outages more so over the last, let's say, year and a half than previously? | |
| The problems there are they're switching from a legacy system to a new updated digitalized system that's really modern. | |
| And the old system, a good portion, I'd say 40% of the aircraft still fly on the old system. | |
| And it was that old system that basically crashed. | |
| It was a hardware issue. | |
| It wasn't a hack. | |
| And we got a lot of briefings on that, and it turned out to not be cyber. | |
| But clearly, those systems are vulnerable to cyber. | |
| So we want to make that transition as quickly as possible. | |
| I guess that's still a good visual representation of what that kind of attack could look like. | |
| So let's go back to the Biden administration strategy. | |
| So maybe over the last two years, let's start with the positives. | |
| What positive steps do you believe they've taken to curb the cybersecurity threat? | |
| So I really like having the cyber. | |
| I think they're calling it the cyber director or cyber czar. | |
| Because cyber, you know, basically it impacts multiple departments across the government. | |
| And so, for example, the NIST standards are set out of commerce. | |
| There are financial requirements that are set for banks and stuff. | |
| That are set in the SEC and places like that. | |
| Treasury. | |
| And then you got DOD, which handles our offensive cyber. | |
| So you have all these various departments. | |
| You have CISA, which is in Homeland Security. | |
| So the defense of the country, domestic defense, is handled by Homeland Security through CISA. | |
| So all these different departments, you really need one central person, much like the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the ODNI. | |
| And I think we may codify this so that it becomes a permanent fixture, much like the ODNI for cyber. | |
| I think that's a good thing that the administration is doing. | |
| I will also say that the head of CISA appears to be really solid. | |
| And at the end of her sentences to me, she always says beat Navy because she's a West Pointer like me. | |
| And so that immediately connects us. | |
| But I think she's doing a very good job. | |
| The worry I have is that they get over-regulatory. | |
| The private sector can handle a lot of this, and we need to let the private sector handle that as it relates to non-government entities. | |
| But if you touch the government interface, then we do need to have some minimal standards. | |
| But what we don't need to do is put arduous requirements on our industry. | |
| So what would a strategy against cybersecurity threats look like? | |
| Because I imagine it's just hackers trying out different vulnerabilities, seeing what they can do, seeing what they can get away with, and then once they know what they can get away with, they keep it in their back pocket until, boom, they need it. | |
| Then they shut down the pipeline just when it's the least convenient to America. | |
| So what does that actually look like in practice to fight back in the cybersecurity realms? | |
| So obviously the government has got to cooperate more with the companies in America to help them identify the vulnerabilities. | |
| And we've got to talk to them because we have an offensive side that likes to have some vulnerabilities for themselves, right? | |
| So we have to be very careful about that and make sure that those vulnerabilities... | |
| Are appropriate. | |
| There needs to be maybe a better mechanism for controlling those vulnerabilities. | |
| And then, of course, we need to alert industry when we discover vulnerabilities that can put our own country at risk. | |
| Yeah, because I imagine it's a very tight loop between the government and the agencies. | |
| SolarWinds is a great example. | |
| That's a private company. | |
| That's a private company, but it touched three departments of the federal government. | |
| And those three departments were compromised because of SolarWinds. | |
| So absolutely there need to be minimum standards for any company that interfaces with the.gov domain. | |
| You mentioned some of the positives that the Biden administration has taken. | |
| What are your criticisms of what they've done for the last two years as well as their strategy document that they've recently published? | |
| Again, I kind of come back to that over-regulation. | |
| Obviously this president has passed more regulations He did in his first year than any president in the history of the country. | |
| And in the cyberspace, he's doing the same thing. | |
| So we just need to kind of dial some of that back and make sure that it makes sense to businesses, too, because they've got to function. | |
| They have a bottom line they have to meet. | |
| And if we burden them with additional costs and they can't do business, it doesn't make sense. | |
| Especially, I would imagine it would create a monopoly situation as the big businesses. | |
| Microsoft can, of course, cover that expense, but the new startups, they might not even be able to get into the game. | |
| Absolutely, and there are some issues. | |
| For example, data breach notifications. | |
| Right now, we're letting the states handle that issue, and some of the states actually contradict one another. | |
| So if you were a small regional player and you're going across six to eight states, let's say, And those states have conflicting data breach notification laws, then you're screwed as a business because the small companies can't leverage, and so the big companies win, | |
| and we're advantaging the larger corporations in consolidation, which is Now, in closing, I wanted to mention that over the weekend, I got a phenomenal opportunity to sit down and have a 25-minute long exclusive interview with the 38th President of Brazil, Mr. | |
| Jair Bolsonaro. | |
| And during that interview, he not only gave me an update on what's taking place in Brazil politically at the moment, but he also shared with me his thoughts about the global political realignment that's taking place across the entire world, as well as tips for countries across the world, including the United States, Western Europe, Australia, countries in Asia, including the United States, Western Europe, Australia, countries in Asia, and of course South America, on how they can actually fight back against socialist and communist subversion. | |
| It's, in my opinion, a phenomenal interview. | |
| And if you want to check it out, I'll throw the link to it. | |
| It'll be right there at the top of the description box. | |
| For your reference, it'll be premiering over on Epic TV at 1 p.m. Eastern tomorrow. | |
| And so if you click on that link, you can sort of save the date and check it out 1 p.m. Eastern tomorrow exclusively on Epic TV. | |
| Again, the link will be right there at the top of the description box. | |
| I hope you check it out. | |
| And until next time, I'm your host, Roman from the Epic Times. | |
| Stay informed. |
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