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Glenn Greenwald reports via The Intercept
The Washington Post on Friday [December 30] reported a genuinely alarming event: Russian hackers have penetrated the U.S. power system through an electrical grid in Vermont. The Post headline conveyed the seriousness of the threat:
[Russian hackers penetrated U.S. electricity grid through a utility in Vermont, officials say]The first sentence of the article directly linked this cyberattack to alleged Russian hacking of the email accounts of the DNC and John Podesta--what is now routinely referred to as "Russian hacking of our election"--by referencing the code name revealed on Wednesday by the Obama administration when it announced sanctions on Russian officials: "A code associated with the Russian hacking operation dubbed Grizzly Steppe by the Obama administration has been detected within the system of a Vermont utility, according to U.S. officials."
The Post article contained grave statements from Vermont officials of the type politicians love to issue after a terrorist attack to show they are tough and in control.
[...] The article went on and on in that vein, with all the standard tactics used by the U.S. media for such stories: quoting anonymous national security officials, reviewing past acts of Russian treachery, and drawing the scariest possible conclusions ("'The question remains: Are they in other systems and what was the intent?' a U.S. official said").
The media reactions, as Alex Pfeiffer documents, were exactly what one would expect: hysterical, alarmist proclamations of Putin's menacing evil.
[...] The Post's story also predictably and very rapidly infected other large media outlets. Reuters thus told its readers around the world: "A malware code associated with Russian hackers has reportedly been detected within the system of a Vermont electric utility."
What's the problem here? It did not happen.
There was no "penetration of the U.S. electricity grid". The truth was undramatic and banal. Burlington Electric, after receiving a Homeland Security notice sent to all U.S. utility companies about the malware code found in the DNC system, searched all its computers and found the code in a single laptop that was not connected to the electric grid.
Apparently, the Post did not even bother to contact the company before running its wildly sensationalistic claims, so Burlington Electric had to issue its own statement to the Burlington Free Press, which debunked the Post's central claim (emphasis in original): "We detected the malware in a single Burlington Electric Department laptop not connected to our organization's grid systems."
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday January 03 2017, @02:51PM
The US allegedly destroyed Iranian centrifuges by using
The problem with this is its almost perfectly analogous to the WWII dam busting raid the USA did where we tried to blow up a dam using some insane rotating skipping bombs that would bounce into the dam before exploding because we didn't have no laser guided GPS guided bombs and cruise missiles back then. And the analogy continues to endless scaremongering about the dam busting raid and "terrorists and Russians are gonna destroy all our dams someday and then I'll say I told you so" and "The only security threat the nation faces is dam busting raids" and stuff like that.
Yeah yeah we did something like a cross between rube goldberg machine and 007 hollywood computer science... one time. You get to do that exactly once per generation or so. Thats it. Not everything with a computer chip in it, not every single attack by "the bad guys of the week", once. One and out, then its done. Yeah it was cool, sure, key word being "was".