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May 12, 2021 - Rudy Giuliani
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The Age Of Cyberwarfare, Why The U.S. Needs A Cyber Force | Rudy Giuliani | Ep. 136
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Hello, this is Rudy Giuliani back with you with Rudy's Common Sense.
The episode today is going to involve something of tremendous importance to us and a real threat to our national security.
I think you know what it is.
It's the attack on the colonial pipeline that at least came to light on Friday, May 7 of 2021, obviously, and We're going to go through it, do the best I can to explain it in terms that everybody can understand, but most importantly, this is showing us the future.
This is where we're going.
In fact, we're there.
This is the era of cyber theft on a major scale, and then the possibility of cyber warfare, which is Frightening, but it's something we can face.
It's no more frightening than atomic weapons.
Biological and chemical horrible attacks and things like that.
So it's just a matter of disciplining ourselves to learn it, deal with it, and be prepared for it.
And it isn't that we haven't made some real strides in the past, starting, oh, 15, 20 years ago.
Probably more than we think.
But then again, there's a lot to this and there's a lot that still needs to be done.
So this attack, Its immediate effect is devastating, and it can be contained.
The attack can be contained if we act swiftly and intelligently and decisively.
And this should not be, let's say from the outset, a partisan issue.
How about we try to deal with this not the way The Democrats, you know, dealt with the pandemic and trying to hurt Trump.
It was a re-election year, so maybe that explains it.
Maybe it doesn't.
Why don't we use a September 11 model for this?
Meaning, let's all work together.
Whether we agree with, disagree with, like or dislike President Biden and his administration, They're going to run a good deal of this, and we have to hope that they make the right decisions, pray for that, and we have to be ready as Republicans to cooperate fully as if the president were a Republican, not just a Democrat.
In fact, in a situation like this, he's a president.
He's not a Republican or a Democrat.
About a much less important topic, maybe to some people just as important, As one of my most illustrious predecessors, one of my heroes, Fiorello LaGuardia used to say, there's no Republican or Democrat way to pick up the garbage.
You just do it right or you do it wrong.
Same thing is true here.
There's no Republican or Democrat way to ameliorate the effects of a cyber attack or to prevent it.
There's the science of it and the engineering of it, and it has to be done right.
And I'm sure on both sides, Republicans, Democrats, and Independents, I know we have skilled people.
So in this particular situation, the Democrat administration is leading the charge.
As loyal Americans, we support them.
And we support them and we wish them well, and we're willing to lend whatever expertise we can that's useful.
So let's avoid this and maybe, just maybe, we'll start something new, huh?
Something more like the wonderful cooperation that I was afforded when I had to deal with the horrendous attack on my city, the 20th anniversary of which is soon going to arrive.
But it was a model of cooperation.
So first let's look at the immediate emergency, which came to light on Friday, May 7.
Now, it probably didn't begin on Friday, May 7.
That's the first date that we can say that people were notified of it.
And let's put in context just exactly what and who Colonial Pipeline is.
Colonial Pipeline is a pipeline company, obviously, that is headquartered in Alpharetta, Georgia.
And it operates the largest pipeline in the United States.
The pipeline is 5,500 miles long.
That's a lot of pipeline.
It delivers 100 million gallons of fuel per day.
100 million gallons of fuel.
And that's about 2.5 million barrels per day.
So you can see that You take that out, or any substantial portion of it, you're going to have a very, very big problem.
That's a lot of gallons of fuel.
And it's fuel is used for gasoline, diesel fuel, petrol, jet fuel, just about anything you would use oil and fuel for.
The company that is responsible Or has pretty much taken responsibility for the attack, is a new really cyber ransomware and software company called DarkSide.
It's not really a company, it's a gang.
I think gang doesn't give it credit for its sophistication, like an organized crime group.
And it's basically a ransomware company.
They develop very, very sophisticated ransomware that can attack a system.
It can encrypt the system, meaning it can gain control of it.
Not the whole thing, maybe parts of it.
And then it also can extract, you know, sensitive information.
As I said, Colonial learned of the attack on, or announced it, that it learned of the attack on Friday, May 7, 2021, and it closed down all of its operations.
All four of the main lines remain offline.
And the FBI confirmed on Monday, quote, the dark side ransomware is responsible for the compromise of the Colonial pipeline networks.
So we must assume, just from my experience in this kind of work, that there was a previous notice to Colonial, which included the demand for ransom, which could be as high as, well, I've seen them go as high as 200 million.
I mean, it could be more, it could be less.
Before this was announced, in the days leading up to it, it is known that they stole, when I say they, you're going to realize I'm not talking about Colonial in a minute, but the attackers stole 100 gigabytes of data.
And that's there for a different reason.
So by May 7, they had accomplished two major things.
They had encrypted a sufficient number of functions So that they felt they could deliver a very crippling blow to the company.
And they had extracted sensitive information that I assume Colonial would not like to have published.
It could be trade secrets.
It could be scandalous material.
It could be financial material.
Could be personal to the executives.
Harmful to the company.
Whatever would extort them, they'll go for.
The attack, this attack raises very, very, very big problems.
Short term and maybe even worse, long term.
So let's try to go through them in sections so we get to understand it and figure out how we should be handling this.
The first and most pressing problem, the most immediate problem is we got to do something about the 100 million barrels, 100 million gallons of oil, 2.5 million barrels.
that is supplied every day.
It constitutes 45% of the fuel supplied to the eastern seaboard.
That's a big percentage.
And this is going to have to be substituted for in some way.
And the scope of that substitution is going to really depend on how long the pipeline is down.
The Colonial says they'll be up by the end of the week.
No way to really know that.
And even if they're up, it's going to take months before they're fully operational again.
So there has to be an effort to immediately find alternatives.
Now, this is an industry I should tell you that I've worked with on cyber.
Not a lot, but enough so that I know that they are, first of all, better organized than most for this kind of thing.
It's something they anticipate.
They do work very well together, the private groups.
And they work well with the federal government.
There, I'm not absolutely sure of how those relationships work.
But I do know they share information very openly with each other, even though they're competitors, about something that their view is, if they attack Colonial, the next one is going to be attacked pretty soon, so they might as well learn for it and help Colonial, and after all, help the country.
The Biden administration has quickly declared an emergency and has used emergency powers to do things that would help them.
First of all, they've expanded the hours for the haulers so that a lot more fuel can be delivered by truck.
And I believe that's going to remain until the beginning of June and see if it has to be extended.
The government is working with other fuel companies, which is really part of the fuel industry's plan, but does need help from the federal government so that substitutions can be made in some of the states that are affected.
Divert fuel from one place to another.
All that the federal government can help with and will help with, although the industry is pretty good at doing that.
And it's granted a temporary waiver so that you can ship oil products by tanker to places like New York, where it's usually prohibited.
So as far as I can tell, so far in the early stages, they've been on top of it, the Biden administration.
They've done the things that you're supposed to do.
It's going to get much more complicated as we move along and the challenges will be great.
And they're not going to get everything right.
Neither would have any administration.
Neither would have Obama or Trump or Bush or anyone.
Again, it's sort of like the pandemic.
This is a novel thing we're dealing with.
The only good thing is I do know that Colonial and these pipelines have been through tabletop exercises and they planned for this.
This is not like, oh my goodness, I never thought this would happen.
Just the opposite.
They were waiting for it to happen, which will help now in the amelioration of it.
The pipeline itself begins in Houston, Texas, and it ends up in Linden, New Jersey.
So, got a little map here, and we'll put a better one up on the screen also.
So it begins here in Houston, about right here, and it goes all the way, and it goes through its The state of its headquarters, Alpharetta, Georgia, and it comes up like this through Virginia.
Ah, and right up here, basically, to New York Harbor.
It also has a, let's call it two small lines.
It has several small lines, but it does bring in another state on an important one.
So, it has two small lines running into Tennessee, but it supplies a significant amount of the fuel for the state of Tennessee.
So, that's the route.
Along that route travels a hundred million gallons of fuel per day to all the states that are part of the pipeline, the pipeline built below their surface, and also then the smaller pipelines.
There also are a couple of other off-lines that go into the states that are already serviced.
So that has now been closed down.
We don't know exactly when it's going to reopen, and we've put up for you to see a more artistic map than that one.
But I thought it would be good if we could just show it to you.
And again, I know the scope of this.
Again, that's 45% of the fuel needs of those states that I just showed, including the District of Columbia, by the way.
And it services It services private companies.
It services hospitals.
It services the gigantic airport in Atlanta, which is one of the biggest in the country, if not in the world.
It services, I believe, one of the airports in Washington, D.C.
It services some of the federal agencies, some of the important federal agencies.
And it services, also quite substantial, all the way up in New York, which is at the end If this lasts more than a couple of days, which it seems like it is, the first impact will be felt in Atlanta and in Tennessee.
If it goes beyond that, if it goes into a week or more, everyone's going to be affected, including New York.
And the price of gasoline is already going up.
The estimates I see say it might go as high as $3 per gallon.
I tend to think that's kind of conservative.
If this lasts for a while, I think it can go up much higher than that, but let's hope.
Let's hope not.
We want to be optimistic, right?
So how did this happen?
A group calling itself the Dark Side, which is a new cyber-hacking ransomware company or gang, Appeared out of nowhere in about, I think I have this right, in August of 2020.
That's just a little while ago.
It's already done some very, very successful hacks.
We don't know how much it's collected.
We do know that it published compromising information on 40 different companies.
that's a lot in that short period of time. And the way it works is Darkseid does not do the actual
operation.
It's DarkSide software and ransomware that is used in the operation.
And they act more or less as the general contractor.
And they bring in what they call an affiliate as their partner, and the affiliate carries out the The penetration, the encryption, and the theft of data.
So, Colonial has acknowledged, in a circuitous way, its involvement in this.
Colonial says that the attack, although substantial, has just been on the business systems of Colonial.
There's no real contradiction to that.
And there's no reason to believe that it went beyond that.
So, that's a very, very serious breach and it can be enormously disruptive.
I guess the one piece of good news is they didn't attack the operational system, that pipeline that I showed you and that you've seen up on the screen.
As far as we know, they haven't breached the operation of that.
But they have breached and encrypted sensitive information and very important business systems to operate the business.
And from my own experience in investigating cyberattacks, including at least one that I would put on a level such as this, it's usually very, very hard to be absolutely accurate about where the source of the hacking is coming from.
Now, DarkSide has helped us here by kind of acknowledging it.
But then again, remember, DarkSide is not really the attacker.
There's another company or companies that are doing the attack that DarkSide is in business with, is in partnership with.
And that company or companies is yet to be identified.
And again, remember, the longer they were in before it was announced, the more they're going to have.
Now, the fact that they couldn't get to the operational part of the company indicates that maybe they weren't in there that long.
But since they shut down all their pipelines, all four main lines, It does mean that this was a significant breach.
So, this software is pretty new.
It's in a second generation.
It is considered to be I wouldn't say any better than anyone else's, but very, very effective software.
The real strength of DarkSide as a cyber-organized crime group is not necessarily that their software and ransomware is state-of-the-art, but better than anybody else's, but they are probably better organized as a business than most of these operations.
In fact, this is a very...
Intricate business arrangement that's involved where people's specialties are used.
And as I said, they use affiliates in order to carry out the attack.
And then the affiliate, of course, then shares on some basis the spoils with Darkseid or with others that may be brought in to help as we'll explain as we move along.
Um, for example, often the entry data is gathered by another type of cyber criminal specialist.
And, um, they would, they would be called, um, access providers.
Basically they spend their time trying to collect all the information, all the passwords, all the emails, all the codes that allow you to get into both people and systems.
And by and large, they don't do it, but then they will sell it or partner with a dark side, and they'll become part of the team that affects this.
So let's take a short break, and we'll be right back.
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Welcome back.
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Welcome back.
I thought I would outline for you how the typical structure works for DarkSide
and for these companies that oversee these massive hacks and ransom situations.
or Darkseid acts as a general contractor.
They're in charge of the whole process.
And although they do farm some of it out, Darkseid in particular remains heavily involved in it.
One of its strengths, as I said earlier, is its corporate structure, but also its ability to gather intelligence on the company and on the people in the companies.
So they are quite involved in everything that their partners are doing.
DarkSide will often use access brokers, and access brokers are in the business of Harvesting and login information, all the different codes, passwords.
They're often big bidders in the auctions that take place when these huge information hacks take place.
And they'll buy up millions and millions of codes and identities.
And then they have it specified to certain industries.
And when DarkSide or one of its competitors has organized a job, To infiltrate, they'll find the access broker who has the most information about that particular industry, and they'll become part of the team.
Or they may just sell it for a price, and then they're finished.
Or they could remain and have a percentage.
The key to it, of course, is the affiliates.
The affiliates are the companies that actually carry out the entry, the encryption, and the gathering of information.
They do it in very close coordination with DarkSide.
So, for example, the ransom that's going to be asked, the leverage that's going to be used for it, a lot of that is developed by DarkSide in conjunction with the affiliates.
But they are using DarkSide software, ransomware.
Actually, DarkSide just published new ransomware, I believe in March, called DarkSide 2.0.
And then certain situations, they'll do business with decryption companies.
Now, decryption companies can be completely legitimate.
I mean, those are the people you bring in to fix your system so that they can decrypt it after it's been encrypted, right?
However, there are some that are on the dark side.
And what they do is when a company Wants to hide the fact that it paid a ransom.
DarkSide selects their decryption company.
The decryption company does the decryption, probably pretty easy because DarkSide shows them how to do it.
But then it charges a huge amount of money, and DarkSide gets its ransom that way.
So basically, the access brokers harvest login details, and they sell them.
The affiliates carry out the attack in conjunction with DarkSide, and the decryption companies fix the problems, fix the encryption.
But if they're illegitimate, they also will launder payments to everyone in the scheme, and therefore they'll hide the ransom.
So you can see this is a very well-organized situation.
a very well organized situation. So we know that on May 7, we had gotten to the point where
Darkside and its affiliate had already notified Colonial of the attack.
Certainly by that time it had stated its ransom demand.
I apparently made it clear or When you look at the chart that I showed you, it kind of reminds me of an organized crime chart.
Well, there's a good reason for that.
their entire system for fear that they had further information and could do even more
permanent damage.
When you look at the chart that I showed you, it kind of reminds me of an organized crime
chart.
Well, there's a good reason for that.
Really, Darkside is an organized crime operation.
The prosecution of this fits perfectly into the racketeering statute.
This is a racketeering enterprise with very, very serious, not just criminal penalties, but wonderful forfeiture provisions that would allow you to deconstruct these companies, take them all apart, like we did to the Teamsters Union or to the fish market or to Las Vegas or to the crime families.
I would recommend, as one of my recommendations, that the Justice Department quickly build up expertise on this intelligence and begin bringing racketeering cases against these ransomware companies.
Any part of the structure RICO's available can be used and would allow for the seizure of everything.
Seizure of the money, seizure of the equipment, It took 20 or 30 years to get there with organized crime.
businesses that they have, it would reduce their power much more quickly than trying to follow
each case with just a simple prosecution. It took 20 or 30 years to get there with organized crime.
Why don't we just, you know, not stop and just go right to where we have to be immediately?
On its website, they have already accomplished at least a leak of information as to 40 victims,
just exactly how many successful operations they've done. I don't know.
And...
And DarkSide has a website, which is rather unusual.
The question comes up, is DarkSide operating for Russia or a particular country?
As far as the information available so far, it looks like this.
It looks like DarkSide is independent, just the way the organized crime groups in Russia are independent.
But it specifically does not hack Russia.
Or what's called them the countries that were formerly part of the Soviet Union.
In fact, it doesn't have the language available to do it.
So it sounds like there was some and maybe a lot of coordination with the Russian government so that for whatever support Russia gave them, they couldn't turn on Russia.
They are incapable of hacking a Russian entity, Ukrainian entity, a Kazakh entity, Basically those countries.
So exactly what the nature of their relationship with the government of Russia is, we don't know.
But it's also obvious that something like this is not going to operate in Russia without Putin's approval.
And it's quite likely without his feathering his nest.
What do they say in the Godfather?
Wetting his beak.
And I think he has a pretty big beak.
But in any event, that's speculation.
What we do know is They are incapable of accessing Russian, Ukrainian, Kazakh systems, which gives you a pretty good hint that they're working with the Russian government.
Exactly how closely that has to be determined, and we don't want to go beyond what we know.
On Monday, however, there was a very, very interesting turn of events.
And it's possible, it's just possible that Darkseid bit off more than it could chew.
This industry so far works a little like the Mafia used to work at the beginning.
They don't like a lot of attention and therefore they prefer to hit companies That are just gonna make a quiet deal with them and pay them the ransom, rather than bring the FBI in or get this kind of publicity.
Well, that, of course, can't happen when you hit a major public utility.
And when you look at their statement of purpose and everything else, it looks like they were trying to avoid that.
Somehow, they did.
And it may very well be that the affiliate maybe went out a little further than Darkseid wanted them to.
So on their website, they have a website.
Amazing, right?
They have an actual website from which we can get a lot of information, by the way, and where they market themselves.
Under a heading about the latest news, which they have on the website to communicate with the press, DarkSide claimed that it's not political and it only wants to make money without causing problems for society.
Let me read to you what it says on the website.
We are apolitical.
We do not participate in geopolitics.
Do not need to tie us with a defined government and look for our motives.
Our goal is to make money and not creating problems for society.
From today, we introduce moderation.
Sounds like a bit of an apology or statement that maybe it went too far.
And check each company that our partners want to encrypt.
So, exactly what that means?
Have they withdrawn their ransom request?
is on the website called Dark Side Leaks.
So exactly what that means, have they withdrawn their ransom request?
Are they going to give colonial substantial assistance in doing the decryption much more
easily?
But it does seem that they didn't want all this attention, particularly so early in their operating life.
I mean, as I said, they first appeared in about August of 2020, which is less than a year ago.
But whatever it means, this is a wake-up call.
Call for us.
Big wake-up call.
We're in a new era.
We're in the era of cyber warfare.
We're in the era in which it's a necessity for our government to develop massive resources to protect us from this.
Think of it this way.
For hundreds of years, all you needed was an army and a navy.
We could have an offshoot of it like the Marines or the Coast Guard or whatever, but you had to protect the seas, you had to protect the land.
All of a sudden, people started flying.
But we didn't just remain with our army and our navy.
We developed first the Army Air Corps and then a separate branch of our military, the Air Force, to protect us in the skies.
Well, now we're under attack by cyber Criminals, cyber-organized crime, and sometimes state actors.
And the damage they can do is as devastating as the damage that can be done to us by attack by air, attack by biological weapons, attack by land.
They can destabilize an entire city.
They can turn ships around to go in another direction.
They can cause chaos.
They can keep us out of necessary programs.
They can basically take down all of the life-saving equipment at a hospital.
I mean, they can do as much or more damage than the Germans and the Nazis were able to do during the Battle of Britain, and in a much more sophisticated way.
This is a full-scale Major danger to our existence, similar to, pretty close to the atomic weapons.
And only an enterprise that is similar in scope, funding, and expertise to our army or our navy Can really deal with this.
So my recommendation is we should develop a branch of the services for cyber warfare.
And it should be stood up quickly.
It should be given the resources that it needs because it's going to have to make up for lost time.
I believe that there's been some effort at that already.
Don't know if that's all I know about it.
I don't know if it's classified or not.
So I'm not going to go any further.
My recommendation is, if we do have it, expand it quickly.
If we don't have it, invent it, the way we invented an Air Force.
It's real simple.
This is a way of being attacked, and we have to be able to defend ourselves.
And making another branch of the military is the way to get it the resources it needs and the discipline it needs right away.
But now it's time to take a short break.
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Thank you for returning and let's get back to our analysis.
Darkside is very new, but look how fast they've grown.
We first find out about them in August 2020, and now they've effectively shut down the largest pipeline in the United States.
So it's really necessary this to be done right away.
And please don't think that this is even the largest infiltration.
Probably last year, the SolarWinds attack was probably even larger.
And because it was undetected for months, the hackers also probably related to Russia, possibly in the same indirect way or Confusing way the dark side is we're in the system for a very long period of time.
So they were able to get the information out of the system.
And they were also able to reach into many, many private businesses, McDonald's, AT&T, Microsoft.
And they were also able to reach into the Pentagon, the state department, the national nuclear security administration.
This was a year ago.
Didn't get the kind of attention this got.
But I mean, that alone should say to us, we need a military branch to defend us against this.
Department of Justice says that in 2020, the demands for ransomware averaged about $100,000.
To tens of millions, so they're all over the place.
More than $350 million was paid last year, and that was a 300% increase over the year before.
And then if you look at this chart that we've put up, you'll see that year to date, each month, the number of ransomware attacks increases.
January looks like a small increase.
February, larger.
March, my goodness, it looks like a 50% increase.
And then April, it looks like 120% increase and who knows what's going to happen in May.
So this is, I think this chart graphically will show you that this is just headed for more and more attacks.
And we have got to be, we've got to be ready for it.
The website is called Dark Side Leaks.
It's on the dark web, so don't go try to find it.
And it is extremely business-like.
It has a section for media contacts.
It says, it says to you, why do I need to register?
So you can ask questions.
So you can notify, you can be, we can notify you of data breaches before posting.
You can get non-public information.
Then they have another section to lure in decryption companies.
You know, I told you that legitimately fixed the problem, but then will launder money to DarkSide and its affiliates.
They have a section for charitable donations.
They make charitable donations.
Now, people have recently refused the money, which is what I recommend, but they're trying to be like a socially responsible company.
They must really think we're fools.
You see, there's a receipt from the Children International receipt.
I believe that money was returned.
Or not taken, but originally, I guess it was, before they found out who it was.
And then, they have a declaration of moral principles.
They say they're never going to attack medical companies, funeral parlors, educational institutions, Or non-profit or government organizations.
I don't know how credible that is.
And a lot of this, I think, is number one for euphemism, you know, to cover what they're doing.
But number two, you know, to put up something like that also says to your victim, it's a pretty substantial operation.
We better not fool around.
So this is professionally run.
Although there's been a prior attack or attacks of a larger scope than this one.
It's like SolarWinds, Metropolitan Police Department was attacked.
Major Apple supplier based in Taiwan, AT&T.
I mean, you can go on and on and on.
This is the most... This is the one that really shows you what they can do.
If they can close down our largest pipeline, they can close down our other pipelines.
They can close down our electrical system.
They can close down our financial system.
And those are things that we've got to be prepared for.
So here's how we have to look at this.
Let's learn from this.
We've been hearing about this for some time.
I've been involved in this for about eight years, and I can tell you, you know, some of the attacks going back seven or eight years ago were pretty darn sophisticated.
And there's no question, gleaning the information I can get out of this, this was an extremely well-executed situation.
And we might not be at the stage of knowing who did it If Darkseid didn't come forward, because usually when you resolve these, even, you know, when you had that whole political situation with the Democratic National Committee, and you do it based on percentages, there's a 75% chance it's this, 85% chance of this one.
So this one we know is Darkseid, because they have Because they've basically taken responsibility for it.
But we still don't know who the affiliate was.
And that's pretty important.
So there's a lot of investigating that is going to have to be done in order to get this resolved.
What does this mean?
It means that the federal government has to take a role here in coordinating.
A lot of the systems that have to be protected are in the private sector.
In this energy sector, they are well organized and they work with each other.
That is not true in every other sector that is critical and important.
And it's the government's role to be assured that they are working together, that they do help each other, that they do have a redundancy so that we can deal with the immediate problem that's created.
And finally, I'd like to make one other point that is so critically important.
And I would urge the president to rethink this in the interest of the country, our future, his children, grandchildren, all of us.
We should not have taken a step back from energy independence.
By cancelling the Keystone Pipeline, by interfering with fracking.
Green technology is not at the point where it can sustain the unbelievable, tremendous demands that this enormously complex structure called America puts on.
That's why China doesn't buy into it.
That's why India doesn't buy into it.
So they're not hampered in their growth by not having enough energy.
We were energy independent.
I don't know technically if we are anymore.
We're at the point where we're not going to be, and we're going to be energy dependent.
If we don't continue to develop, if we don't continue to do fracking, if we don't continue to develop the tremendous resources we have, both through fracking and through actual oil that's right there deep in the earth, we may very well have the second or third largest reserves in the world.
We have to use those to make us independent for purposes of national security.
Because the more redundancy we have, the harder it is to really affect us.
You will see if this lasts just a few days, we can handle it.
If it goes on longer than that, we're going to start stretching and just get exercise common sense.
The more The more redundancy we have when they do do an attack, it makes everything that much more secure.
There's no perfect answer to this.
Don't know that we'll ever get to the stage where you can completely stop every attack.
We're not even close to that.
We are at the stage where we handle them really much better.
And I know there are going to be mistakes made, but believe me, believe me, these companies work on this.
And they put hundreds of millions of dollars into preparing for this.
And it's a real benefit to us because that helps the government and the government can help them.
So if certain mistakes are made in the response, don't be too critical.
This is still trial and error.
And so far, I think this has been handled well.
The most important thing now is we're going to have to find out and learn from it.
Who's really behind it?
So we can stop them in the future.
What additional resources do we need so they can't go any further?
Thinking a cyber army is absolutely critical.
And I think the federal government acting as the coordinator in private sector areas where cooperation is desperately needed.
And even when the cooperation is good, the federal government should be tied into it.
This is something we all can contribute to by being careful with our own passwords, with our own equipment, changing them, making sure we have the right software to protect our own files and our own information.
It's hard, because they are able to crack through the most sophisticated systems, and you say, well, gee, I'm not a sophisticated system.
But try.
The more you try, the better you are.
And the more defenses you have, the more the hacker is going to move on to somebody else who doesn't have as many defenses, because he may be able to crack you, but it just isn't worth it.
It'll take too much time.
So I would spend some time educating myself because we almost all now have a sufficient amount of equipment giving us access to the internet so we should protect ourselves and our families.
And then we should support the government acting as one.
In building the resources that are necessary so we have an even better response than we have right now.
I'm not critical at all of the response that we have now because I think it's better than you think.
But I want it to be at the level of a Major army, so that anybody thinking of attacking us is going to have to face that and maybe face the consequences of a cyber attack in return.
That would be absolutely devastating because we keep this quiet, but we may very well be the most gifted and the most resourceful country in terms of our own ability to attack.
And you don't want to emphasize that too much.
But having seen some of this, I can tell you, if we're not the best, there's nobody much better.
So, I hope this was helpful.
Please communicate with me on rudyscommonsense.com your contribution to this, things we may have missed, things you may want to know.
And I'd really enjoy getting into a dialogue with you about it.
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