How are we going to protect our societies against cyber attacks? Latest victim The Colonial Pipeline

[Questerr]

Wonderful...that should make you have a GREAT day as a patriotic American.

Indeed. It’s nice one of us will.

 

[VanceMack]

Indeed. It’s nice one of us will.

Dood...seriously...whatever damage I did to you...rub some ointment on it and quit hitting it. You'll feel better soon...I promise.

 

[Mircea]

How are we going to protect our societies against cyber attacks? Latest victim The Colonial Pipeline​

You cannot, so long as humans are part of the equation.

Even if you had machines write the code, people would simply use other machines to break the code or find back-doors.

Good luck with that.

 

[Waddy]

How are we going to protect our computer systems from cyber attacks when most of the components in our systems are manufactured by the country doing the attacking?

 

[Mircea]

How are we going to protect our computer systems from cyber attacks when most of the components in our systems are manufactured by the country doing the attacking?

Where they are manufactured has nothing to do with it.

It has to do with the code -- the instructions -- which are written by humans.

 

[Waddy]

Where they are manufactured has nothing to do with it.

It has to do with the code -- the instructions -- which are written by humans.

Hardware can have back doors ALREADY built in, usually with installed firmware that can be accessed. That chip you just bought is not "blank". It has firmware already installed.

It’s called a hardware backdoor, and it’s a lot like a software virus that grants backdoor access to your computer — but the code resides in the firmware of a computer chip. In short, firmware is software that is stored in non-volatile memory on a computer chip, and is used to initialize a piece of hardware’s functionality. In a PC, the BIOS is the most common example of firmware — but in the case of wireless routers, a whole Linux operating system is stored in firmware.

Rakshasa: The hardware backdoor that China could embed in every computer - ExtremeTech

It's the Information Age apocalypse: What if, no matter how hard you tried, every computer on the market came pre-loaded with an irremovable backdoor that allowed the government or other nefarious agents to snoop on your data, behavior, and communications?

www.extremetech.com

 

[Juks]

You cannot, so long as humans are part of the equation.

Even if you had machines write the code, people would simply use other machines to break the code or find back-doors.

Good luck with that.

What about my suggestion to close those systems from Internet? It isn't like it didn't exist before internet, so it would be doable. I don't mean close them from internal communication , just build internal nets instead of using internet.

 

[Mircea]

What about my suggestion to close those systems from Internet?

Then they wouldn't work. If --by removing them from the internet -- you mean go back to the old way of doing things, sure you could do that in theory, but not in reality, because you don't have the labor.

There's also the issue of price.

People are whining now that gasoline is $3/gallon, so will we all drown in their tears when gasoline is permanently $4/gallon and higher?

It isn't like it didn't exist before internet, so it would be doable. I don't mean close them from internal communication , just build internal nets instead of using internet.

Internal networks can be hacked, too.

To have an internal network, every link in the chain would have to be isolated from the internet, and that's both problematic and costly, because basically you'd need a totally independent internet.

That would be cost-prohibitive and still not fool-proof.

Also, I don't think you understand that pipelines have both electronic pumps and electronic valves. They're not actually hooked into the internet, You control them with radio, broadband or satellite (basically same as broadband).

So, I'm in Texas monitoring a valve-pump-valve combo in Ohio, or maybe the pipeline splits so it's valve-pump-valve-valve. I know what they're doing, because they broadcast a radio signal to a tower that goes across the internet, or in really remote areas, it'll broadcast to a satellite.