Alright folks, welcome back to Cheddars, news wrap
the federal government and the oil and gas industry are
still reeling from a cyberattack on a key pipeline this
past weekend. The FBI saying today that the Russian
hacking group known as dark side, was responsible for
the attack on the colonial pipeline, which has been
shut down for four days since the attack. The
oil artery is responsible for nearly half of the oil
used along the american east coast and he continued shutdown
could mean a serious uptick in gas prices, join
us now. For more on this is Jameel Jaffer
, senior Vice president at Iron Net cybersecurity. Also
founder and executive director of the National Security Institute at
George Mason's antonin Scalia Law School. Good to have
you here, Jamal, thank you for taking the
time. So a lot of people hear the phrase
ransomware attack. They don't actually know what a ransom
where attack actually is. A lot of times it's
tied to some sort of exploitive nature or uh,
you know, exploiting something here. How is it
that it could bring a key part of oil infrastructure
to its knees? What do you understand about what
happened? Yeah, that's a great question. So
the way the ransomware attack works is the malware that
is to say the software that causes problems in your
network could do anything like provide access to uh,
to an end user or like into your network.
In the case of ransomware. What it does is
it takes all your files and encrypts them, it
makes them unusable without a key and what it does
with the ransomware then Attackers says, hey look if
you want your data back, you've got to give
me a certain amount of money. Often in Bitcoin
and all decrypt your data for you. Now of
course the deal you're making with them is you're assuming
that if you actually pay them, they will do
the decryption. Now, the way this can have
an effect on oil and gas pipeline or frankly,
any system is when you encrypt data and systems across
a range of things, not just encrypting emails and
files, including the very way that they conduct their
business, how they monitor the pipeline, how it
moves and how it acts. And so it can
prevent you from actually being able to use that capability
in the system. And that's where ransom, where
, um, and and, and, you know
, activities like a pipeline might overlap. Turning to
potential motives here, Jameel the FBI has confirmed that
it is this sort of shadowy Russian based entity that's
responsible the group for whatever it's worth. Has responded
with a statement on its website saying, quote,
our goal is to make money not creating problems for
society. Do they declared motives of the bad actors
in this situation? Even matter? Does it matter
what the company or what the group says? Its
end goal was? Well, look, we don't
know what they're actually goals, We know what they
have said, right? And at the end of
the day, if they're taking on a pipeline,
doesn't matter where they're doing it for money or nation
state purposes, it can have a huge impact on
the US, our national security and economic security.
Now, that being said, there are reasons to
think that some of these Eastern european hackers have nation
state ties we've seen in the past. And in
fact Russia is used ransomware attacks in the past,
Not pet shipping. The most obvious example of that
where it looks like ransom, but in fact,
the goal was to do something much more malicious in
that case, go after the government Ukraine the collateral
damage from that attack,$10 billion$300 per company
. For about 67 Western companies that weren't even really
Ukraine affiliated. So these things can have huge impacts
and can have it states behind them. Even when
that's not the expressed motive. Jamal I know many
of us here who work in news are forced to
have short attention spans are short memories because the news
cycle is just that vigorous sometimes. But people will
remember that we are still dealing with the fallout of
the solar winds attack. Do you see these two
as being related? Are there learned lessons from the
one or is any sort of com is it premature
to even mention the two in the same sentence at
this point? No. J. D. It's
a great point because really fundamentally both solar winds,
the Microsoft exchange hacks that we saw the pulse secure
hack that we just reached a saw and now this
one targeted pipeline all have a common threat which is
to say how do we defend against these things when
we see various capable organized criminal groups or nation state
Attackers coming after us? How do we defend?
And the challenges is that today we expect every single
company individually defend themselves. Every single government agency working
isolation defend themselves. That simply doesn't make sense.
As a cyberspace Election commission just a year ago said
we've got to get together collectively defend, bring companies
together with other companies industries together with industries and frankly
bring the government industry together to share information and not
just share information but to collaborate in real time to
knock these threats down. We're never going to get
ahead of it if we do it solely one by
one and that's the key to this whole thing.
Is coming together in this collective and collaborate defense network
. Well, you talk about coming together, there
aren't many issues that bring together republicans and democrats,
but the condemnation of this hack is certainly one of
them. You had a republican like Ben Sasse a
democrat in the Senate, like Ed Markey of massachusetts
saying the United States here woefully unprepared yet again for
another systemic attack. What is if any of the
appropriate response? Let's start with Congress. What should
that end of pennsylvania avenue du Well, JD one
of things congress can do right now is spend the
time and effort to create what I would call a
joint collaborative environment. This is something that the cyberspace
lawyer and commission recommended a year ago. It wasn't
done at the end of last year when they did
the number of the recommendations and it's really bringing together
disparate parts of the government to share information but also
go beyond what the commission said, its legislative recommendations
and really think idea, Collective defense seriously bring the
private sector in now, create that radar picture of
our cyber security situation, right? There's been a
lot of talk in the Bush administration. We need
an NTSB for cyber or we need breach notification.
That's great. But we're getting ahead of putting the
cart before the horse. We need the radar picture
, what's happening on cyber on cyberspace to really defend
ourselves and then we need to collaborate, defend ourselves
ahead of time. Not just notify about breaches.
Congress can empower that help that happen, but some
money behind it. To me that's a critical effort
and really could change the game when it comes to
cyber security jimmy. I'm really appreciate your time to
talk about this issue. My final question, though
, I mean, do you have confidence that the
necessary power brokers here in Washington are going to do
the right thing and I'm afraid to ask this next
one. But are you and I going to be
sitting here a few months from now having a very
similar conversation about a totally different hack? Well,
J. D. I certainly hope not. You
know, we are now on notice. If we
have been on this for the last 10, 15
years that this is real and it smashed security threat
, we're now on notice. Our private sector owns
and operates the vast majority critical infrastructure in this country
. If the government industry don't come together now and
industry doesn't get together with each other, right?
We have nobody to blame but ourselves for not get
ahead of this problem. Policymakers can and should do
more in this space. The bio demonstration Has an
awesome 18, the particular side of people. Now
, we just need Congress in the industry to work
together, get this thing done and move forward.
Jameel Jaffer, senior VP at Iron Net cybersecurity,
also founder and executive director of the National Security Institute
at George Mason's antonin Scalia Law School. Jamil,
my special thanks. That's a really important topic.
We will stay on top of it.