Llewellyn King: Internet is a cesspool of crime, war and mischief

Via Inside Sources

The big news coming out of the G7 meeting in Japan will not be about establishing international norms for cybersecurity. That will only get an honorable mention at best. But maybe it should get greater attention: The threat is real and growing.

Consider just these four events of the recent past:

The electric grid in Ukraine was brought down last Dec. 23 by, it is believed, the Russians. Because of its older design, operators were able to restore power with manual overrides of the computer-controlled system.

The Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center in Los Angeles was ransomed. This crime takes place when a hacker encrypts your data and demands a ransom, often in untraceable bitcoin, to unlock it. The hospital paid $17,000 rather than risk patients and its ability to operate.

While these ransom attacks are fairly common, this is the first one believed to have been launched against a hospital. Previously, hospitals had thought patient records and payment details were what hackers would want, not control of the operating systems. Some of the ransoms are as low as $3,000, with the criminals clearly betting that the victims would lose much more by not settling immediately, as did the medical center. The extortionists first asked for $3.6 million.

In a blockbuster heist on the Internet, the Bangladesh central bank was robbed of $81 million. The crooks were able to authorize the Federal Reserve of New York to release the money held in an account there. They would have got away with another $860 million, if it were not for a typing mistake. In this case, the money was wired to fraudulent accounts in the Philippines and Sri Lanka.

Target, the giant retailer, lost millions of customer records, including credit-card details, to an attack in February 2014. Since then, these attacks on retailers to get data have become common. Hackers sell credit card details on what is known as the “black web” to other criminals for big money.Often the finger is pointed at China, which will not be at the G7. While it may be a perpetrator, it also has victim concerns. There is no reason to think that Chinese commerce is not as vulnerable as that in the West.

China, with the help of the Red Army, is blamed in many attacks, particularly on U.S. government departments. But little is known of attacks Chinese institutions sustain.

Governments want to police the Internet and protect their commerce and citizens, but they are also interested in using it in cyberwar. Additionally, they freely use it in the collection of intelligence and as a tool of war or persuasion. Witness U.S. attempts to impede the operation of the centrifuges in Iran and its acknowledged attacks on the computers of ISIS.

As the Net’s guerilla war intensifies, the U.S. electric utility industry, and those of other countries, is a major source of concern, especially since the Ukraine attack. Scott Aaronson, who heads up the cybersecurity efforts of the Edison Electric Institute, the trade group for private utilities, says the government’s role is essential and the electric companies work closely with the government in bracing their own cyber defenses.

Still, opinions differ dramatically about the vulnerability of the electric grid.

These contrasting opinions were on view at a meeting in Boston last month, when two of the top experts on cybersecurity took opposing views of utility vulnerability. Juliette Kayyem, a former assistant secretary for intergovernmental affairs at the Department of Homeland Security who now teaches emergency management at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, said she believed the threat to the electric grid was not severe. But Mourad Debbabi, a professor at Concordia University in Montreal, who also has had a career in private industry, thinks the grid is vulnerable -- and that vulnerability goes all the way down to new "smart meters."

The fact is that the grid is the battleground for what Aaronson calls “asymmetrical war” where the enemy is varied in skill, purpose and location, while the victims are the equivalent of a standing army, vigilant and vulnerable. No amount of government collaboration will stop criminals and rogue non-state players from hacking out of greed, or malice, or just plain hacker adventurism.

Governments have double standards, exempting themselves when it suits from the norms they are trying to institutionalize. Cyber mischief and defending against it are both big businesses, and the existential threat is always there. 

Llewellyn King is a longtime publisher, columnist and international business consultant. He is host and executive producer of White House Chronicle, on PBS.

Editor's note: See bostonglobalforum.org for coverage of  international cybersecurity issues.

James P. Freeman: Mass. Democrats in fantasyland

“Without a doubt

When it comes to ideas about everything

King Friday XIII has them”

-- King Friday XIII, from “Making and Creating,” 1986

As Gov. Deval Patrick, the commonwealth’s veritable King Friday, prepares the dissolution of his domain, Democrats, with yeomanly purpose, searching for progressivism of yore, will soon descend upon the hills of Worcester to nominate a gubernatorial candidate. Who will play Queen Sara Saturday or Prince Tuesday to Patrick’s Friday?

In 1867 (the year Republicans held majorities over Democrats of 40-0 in the Senate and 230-10 in the House) Walt Whitman first published “O Me! O Life!.” If life is “a powerful play that goes on,” distressed Democrats may wish to control-alt-delete the last eight years of verse.

Patrick may be the most supercilious (about his abilities and policies) and super-sensitive (about criticism of his abilities and policies) public servant in modern-day Massachusetts. Given the official record, it will be interesting watching his party apply a progressive pumice to the corrosive and incorrigible government he has led.

A sampling of the governor’s ideas, leadership and management efforts: Funding at the embattled Department of Children and Families has been cut by over $100 million from fiscal 2007 to 2015 (12.4 percent). Unfunded pension liabilities have grown substantially to $23.6 billion. Government spending has increased by an average of $1 billion per year. State sales tax has increased by 25 percent. The gas tax, now pegged to inflation, will increase in perpetuity. Property taxes have risen by billions.

The once vaunted health-care exchange is left in ruins — now the worst performing in the country -- with $57 million having been spent on an unworkable Web site, with 160,000 residents being placed indefinitely on Medicaid, costing uncounted millions of dollars. Bankrupt Evergreen Solar, costing residents $50 million, “wasn’t a failure.” Welfare waste and fraud (19,000 “missing” recipients) is described as “leakage” and full of “anecdotes.” The imposition of near-martial law in the wake of last year’s marathon bombings was euphemistically called “shelter in place.”

A number of Democrat candidates have cited the following: Massachusetts has ranked in the bottom 15 states over the past decade in job creation. It has the sixth highest rate in America of drug users under the age of 18 (during an “opiate epidemic”). The commonwealth ranks 8th worst in the country for income inequality. The homeless population has grown by 8.7 percent in the last year, while rates have fallen nationally; taxpayers now spend $50 million annually to place homeless in hotels.

This has all occurred with the complicity of Democrat super-majorities in the legislature.

In polite progressive circles, however, there must be unimaginably little mention of Patrick’s “accomplishments” given the sheer puerility of them. At least former governor Michael Dukakis, the last true progressive, talked about competence. Of the five major Democrat candidates for governor, none speak about progress made because of the sheer preposterousness of the suggestion.

Today’s candidates surely must be living in the Neighborhood of Make Believe given their willful ignorance of serious matters affecting the commonwealth. Each echoes a narcissistic sentimentalism for timeless and timely liberal themes; each exhibits a certain cognitive dissonance about what is important, given the absence of addressing critical issues and proposing sensible ideas in their campaigns.

State Atty. Gen. Martha Coakley, consistently leading in primary- and general-election polling, believes that citizens should have greater “access” to community health centers. She desires expansion of “learning time” for education while lowering the costs of higher education (was Elizabeth Warren’s $347,000 salary at Harvard too high?).

State Treasurer Steven Grossman, who will “combine his progressive values and business experience,” has presided over an increase in the commonwealth’s unfunded pension liabilities while at treasury. He claims to have “revolutionized the way government operates at treasury.” He is also “fully committed” to achieving the goals of the MA Global Warming Solutions Act.

Corporate executive Joseph Avellone, M.D., is convinced “our largest challenge is and will be climate change.” Yet his “highest priority” is education.

Juliette Kayyem, former assistant secretary for the federal Department of Homeland Security, “will focus on the issues that matter most to Bay Staters.” Among them: “combat[ing] climate change” and “protect[ion] of women’s reproductive rights.”

Finally, Donald Berwick, M.D., former Obamacare administrator, also believes climate change is the “most pressing concern to the health of our planet.” He sees Massachusetts leading the charge to have 3.3 million electric vehicles on our roads by 2025.

Here is a real pressing problem: The last time a Democrat succeeded a two-term Democrat governor was November 1934 when James Michael Curly was elected after Joseph B. Ely (1931-1935), when terms were two years. It has never occurred in the modern era when terms were extended to four years in 1966.

What should be clear in 2014, regardless, is that whomever the nominee, he or she may need a magical Boomerang-Toomerang-Zoomerang to ensure the neighborhood corner office remains in control of a Democrat.

James P. Freeman is a Cape Cod-based columnist.

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