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| Colonial Pipeline and how it's shut down effects all (Page 9/10) |
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rinselberg
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MAY 13, 09:27 AM
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| quote | Originally posted by 82-T/A [At Work]:
Unlikely at all... what will happen in stead is that the main stream media will not discuss the Colonial Pipeline issues much at all, other than a casual comment about it. Any discussion that they do give will be geared towards a few things:
1 - Government needs to regulate businesses better
2 - This is why we need to get off fossil fuels
3 - Trump left the country in a precarious state with his scandals, now Biden has to clean up the mess.
All of it will be total nonsense of course... |
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I'm looking at a new report from the New York Times. Mainstream media, would you say? I am going to line up this report with these comments from "82".
"Pipeline Hack Points to Growing Cybersecurity Risk for Energy System"
| quote | | Energy infrastructure has increasingly come under assault, and analysts said the attack that cut off fuel supplies this week should be a “wake-up call.” |
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Brad Plumer for the New York Times; May 13, 2021.
https://www.nytimes.com/202...ack-energy-grid.html
EXCERPT
| quote | Despite years of warnings, America’s vast network of pipelines, electric grids and power plants remains acutely vulnerable to cyberattacks with the potential to disrupt energy supplies for millions of people. Dealing with those risks, analysts said, will pose a major challenge for the Biden administration as it seeks hundreds of billions of dollars to modernize the nation’s energy infrastructure and transition to cleaner sources of energy to address climate change.
Regulators are increasingly poised to step in. On Monday, Richard Glick, the chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, said it was time to establish mandatory cybersecurity standards for the nation’s nearly 3 million miles of oil and gas pipelines, similar to those currently found in the electricity sector.
“Simply encouraging pipelines to voluntarily adopt best practices is an inadequate response to the ever-increasing number and sophistication of malevolent cyber actors,” Mr. Glick said in a statement. |
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How does this report stack up against the "82" checklist?
"Government needs to regulate businesses better."
CHECK.
"This is why we need to get off fossil fuels."
NO. Not that I see. The only reference to "getting off fossil fuels" are the words in boldface in the EXCERPT that I have provided. It's a reference to getting off fossil fuels, but it is not any kind of emphatic argument for getting off fossil fuels. So I say "NO." Not "CHECK", but "NO."
"Trump left the country in a precarious state with his scandals, now Biden has to clean up the mess."
NO. The name "Trump" does not appear anywhere in the report. Nor is there any reference to "scandal" or "mess" or any suggestion along the lines of "Orange Man Bad" and that's particularly the reason that Biden has such a big clean up job on his hands.
I have "one for three" in terms of this New York Times report VS "82 mainstream media checklist." The "82 checklist" is batting 0.333--which would be great if it were a baseball player.
This, of course, is just a single mainstream media report. But I think it has a definite clout or cachet, coming from the New York Times.
Here's another excerpt:
| quote | In the past, energy companies typically kept the operational systems that run pipelines or power plants disconnected, or “air gapped,” from the broader internet, which meant that hackers could not easily gain access to the most critical infrastructure. But increasingly that’s no longer the case, as companies install more sophisticated monitoring and diagnostics software that help them operate these systems more efficiently. That potentially creates new cybersecurity risks.
“Now these systems are all interconnected in ways that the companies themselves don’t always fully understand,” said Marty Edwards, vice president of operational technology for Tenable, a cybersecurity firm. “That provides an opportunity for attacks in one area to propagate elsewhere.” |
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That clearly lines up with what "82" and "Raydar" have been saying here.[This message has been edited by rinselberg (edited 05-14-2021).]
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sourmash
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MAY 13, 10:15 AM
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If you're Colonial Pipeline and covering thousands of miles of pipeline with multiples of different LECs and ILECS how does your SCADA stay air gapped? With personnel at control points pushing the actual buttons? How do you physically run a SCADA across that scale and through those exchanges? A dedicated diverse loop?
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blackrams
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MAY 13, 10:18 AM
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| quote | Originally posted by sourmash:
If you're Colonial Pipeline and covering thousands of miles of pipeline with multiples of different LECs and ILECS how does your SCADA stay air gapped? With personnel at control points pushing the actual buttons? How do you physically run a SCADA across that scale and through those exchanges? A dedicated diverse loop? |
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Way out of my area of expertise............. Trained Monkeys?? 
Rams
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blackrams
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MAY 13, 10:51 AM
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Jake_Dragon
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MAY 13, 11:03 AM
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cliffw
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MAY 13, 01:07 PM
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| quote | Originally posted by sourmash:
If you're Colonial Pipeline and covering thousands of miles of pipeline with multiples of different LECs and ILECS how does your SCADA stay air gapped? With personnel at control points pushing the actual buttons? How do you physically run a SCADA across that scale and through those exchanges? A dedicated diverse loop? |
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English please.
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LECs and ILECS, how does your SCADA stay air gapped ... |
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82-T/A [At Work]
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MAY 13, 06:29 PM
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| quote | Originally posted by cliffw:
English please.
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Air Gapped... refers to the network not having any kind of "formal" connection to another public network. A "true" air gapped network would be one in which there is *literally* no network or communications connection to any other networks at all... so for example. Let's say the year is 1989 and you run a large hotel, and you have a small business network in your hotel that all of your business employees (finance, comptroller, manager of housekeeping, front desk, etc.) all use, and it's hooked up to an old IBM. Since there's no real internet to speak of (that we recognize today), that network doesn't connect to anything outside of the hotel. THAT is an "air-gapped" network... but really, it's air gapped because there was nothing else.
Most hotels (using the same example), might still have a network like that, though with newer hardware (servers, computers, etc.), but it ultimately connects to the internet so that the hotel can communicate with corporate for numbers, figures, bookings, whatever... and for public / commercial e-mail.
Air Gapped simply means there's no way to get into the network from the outside. But most modern offices use the term loosely, and they still connect the network to the internet, but use "software" or in some cases, hardware, to segment the network. For example, your home router that allows your in-home wireless network to connect to the internet... they have things like that in corporate networks that allow the internal network to connect to the internet, but usually designed to limit what kind of traffic can go through. Routers, Firewalls, and other devices handle this. You can do it through software using something called VLANs and ACLs. But all of that in some way is hackable. Find an exploit for that router, firewall, or switch, and now you can bypass all that stuff. Or... even if you just get credentials (login / passwords) you can reconfigure it and allow your malicious traffic through.
What Sourmash is talking about are the "protocols" ... which is usually the data packets that the "controller" uses to communicate with the individual programmable logic boards... (the devices that control valves, machinery, etc.).
What Sourmash is saying is... how can you have an "air-gapped network" when you have a distributed environment... meaning that you have multiple locations. For example... a train track / train system. You have the trains, and then you have thousands of controllers that handle everything from the crossing-guards to the track shifts.
Short of running your own cabling to everything, you have no other way to have a true "air gapped" network... and so there's some need there to still connect via the internet.
BUT, I disagree with that. Most internet companies (Verizon, ATT, etc...) allow the lease of "dedicated pipes" ... which literally means you are registering bandwidth from one connection point to another. While it travels the same "path" the internet goes, it doesn't translate to the internet. You would generally have an encryption device at both ends, and the phone / data company would provide this. This is still technically considered an "air-gapped" network because there's no real way to get to it through the internet... generally because you are either using independent fiber strands, or the encryption devices aren't resolved to the internet.
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sourmash
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MAY 13, 07:37 PM
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The physical plant that SCADA runs on and having it where it needs to be as it runs through LEC (local exchange carriers) and independent local exchange carriers for thousands of miles is a hurdle.
So if Verizon or someone has a hut with equipment and plant to lease space for this, will it always be where it's needed?
I guess it could be. But is it? Thousands of miles.
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82-T/A [At Work]
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MAY 13, 09:13 PM
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| quote | Originally posted by sourmash:
The physical plant that SCADA runs on and having it where it needs to be as it runs through LEC (local exchange carriers) and independent local exchange carriers for thousands of miles is a hurdle.
So if Verizon or someone has a hut with equipment and plant to lease space for this, will it always be where it's needed?
I guess it could be. But is it? Thousands of miles. |
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I mean, as long as it's an encrypted pipe... then the only thing really of concern would be the local administrative network that controls the routers I'd think. There's always a way... of course. Even if they had a dedicated network line that ran the length of the pipe... you could always try to patch in somewhere.
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sourmash
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MAY 13, 09:44 PM
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Yeah, I guess. This probably has every network security protocol at every corp going into full tilt boogie getting amped up for a potential cyber- pandemic.
But even with an air gap can there be the 'found a memory stick in the parking lot, so let's plug it in and see what's on it when we go inside the hut' as was supposedly done with the first Iranian meltdown of centrifuges?
If it's a real air gap, yes.[This message has been edited by sourmash (edited 05-13-2021).]
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