Let's play a game: how many time we will need to see ALL cars of a certain brand bricked by a bad OTA upgrade or a deliberate attack? It's a matter of IT/cracking OR a matter of current commercial-drive bad IT evolution?
Try to read a bit about recent famous aqueduct sabotages like
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/us-government...
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/hackers-undet...
https://arstechnica.com/?p=1765767
and so on. It's really a matter of hacking and cracking? Honestly my own personal answer is no. It's a matter of widespread ignorance and business practice.
Knock out a grid with cyber, ok the enemy is prepared and can do a hard reset. Power loss of a few minutes, hours at most. Then that attack vector is gone as cyber defenses are put in place.
Blow up a substation, you have bigger problems. Power loss for several hours or days.
Russia can still do “low tech” cyber attacks like DDoS, but this war is making a case for cyber weapons being more useful during pseudo-peacetime clandestine espionage than a consistently equivalent tool to bullets and bombs.
Said researchers are active on Twitter and have since turned to openly posting about cybercrime. Sad turn of events all done in the name of "Ukraine good".
It's more "Russia bad" than "Ukraine good", and that seems fair.
> "Ukrainian resilience was helped, paradoxically, by the primitive nature of many of its industrial-control systems—inherited from Soviet days and not yet upgraded. When, for example, Industroyer hit electrical substations in Kyiv in 2016, engineers were able to reset systems with manual overrides within a few hours."
However, that article also makes an unsubstantiated claim:
> "The sabotage of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines in September, and missile attacks on Ukraine’s power grid, suggest that the Kremlin’s appetite for risk is growing."
It seems fairly obvious that Russia had little to gain from blowing up its own gas pipelines to Europe, while Britain and the USA viewed that as 'a great opportunity' (Blinken) for replacing Russian pipeline gas with tanker LNG. The Swedish/Danish investigation is apparently ongoing, Germany has classified everything, but the goals of the overall economic battle should be obvious: it's all about who gets access to the European energy market.
Incidentally, the terms 'black, grey, white' are also used to describe propaganda tactics as used in psychological warfare operations:
> "White propaganda: The information is truthful and only moderately biased. The source of the information is cited."
> "Grey propaganda: The information is mostly truthful and contains no information that can be disproven. However, no sources are cited."
> "Black propaganda: Literally “fake news,” the information is false or deceitful and is attributed to sources not responsible for its creation."
https://www.thoughtco.com/psychological-warfare-definition-4...
Almost all of the news we see today, on essentially all important topics, falls into one of the above categories (with social media posts having the most actual 'fake news' content).
There was as much energy chaos before as there was after.
The presence of a stopped pipeline simply meant that there was an off switch on the energy chaos in Germany that could be flipped - presumably a switch that comes with Russian strings attached.
Somebody was pretty desperate to remove that off switch from Germany's hands.
It's also a switch that, if flipped, would render a multibillion dollar investment in LNG port capacity instantaneously worthless.
The best argument I heard is, that russia has a long term legal binding contract with germany to deliver cheap gas. Not delivering means more economical damage in the shape as absurd as this whole charade sounds.
So blowing it up means not being legally responsible for not fulfilling the contract.
Did they do it?
I don't know. What I do know, is that so far the investigation is not really transparent and I have not seen clear proof of anything, except that it was a really big explosive.
This isn’t a great argument because they have little to gain from the war at all (outside of a few of the elites). Ergo, from a distance it appears Russia is irrational unless you consider that Putin et al. only care about surviving and being extremely wealthy.
In the latter case, there is therefore a possibility that Putin would want to destroy Nord Stream to prevent possible opponents from having an out to help Europe were they to get support to overthrow Putin internally.
https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2022/11/30/...
Nothing about white hats, grey hats is in the article. Single example of black hat weaponization (Conti), without external reference.
(ChatGPT?)
Submitters: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
(Sometimes the publications change their own titles, in which case of course the submitter is not at fault.)
