Coffee Break // Cyber News 001
Good morning ladies and germs,
The world is still turning and burning (much like this cup of half-caf as it sears my stomach) and cyberspace is as always alight with warfare and crime. Here’s a quick round-up of some of this week’s cyber news so far.
Yesterday I covered the Secret Service’s press release about the SIM farm they busted near NYC. Major outlets have been picking up the story and adding their own spin to it over the past 24 hours and, much like I did at first, they’re largely parroting the Secret Service’s PR line. (More on that in a moment.)
Take, for example, NPR’s coverage of the matter. Not only do they repeat everything we learned in the original release, but they go on to imply that a PRC-linked APT group, (APT in this context refers to an Advanced Persistent Threat.) Salt Typhoon, might be involved. As far as I can tell however, this is pure speculation on NPR’s part.
But before we go wild with interest over the potential involvement of foreign governments, we should take a step back and examine the actual scope of the SIM farm in question.
Playing counter-point to the main stream media opinions is cyber analyst Marcus Hutchins. An expert known for helping counter the infamous WannaCry attack in 2017, Marcus emphasized the scale of the attack as a reason for tempering our alarm.
”New York is incredibly dense,” Marcus opines. “… Think about the New Year’s Eve ball drop—you have possibly a million or more people all in Times Square at the same time. That is way more cell phones than this device actually has. … So it’s unlikely that a device with this low capacity would actually be able to overwhelm New York’s cell network.”
This is a great reminder for how media coverage can spin a story. I, and I’m sure many others, listened to the initial coverage and thought “wow, 100,000 is such a big number… that must make a huge difference!” without really stopping to consider the context in which that number is put. As Hutchins pointed out, 100,000 SIMs is a drop in the bucket to the overall network of NYC.
In other news, ransomware attacks committed against EU airports last Friday continue to cause delays and interfere with business operations.
In recent years, ransomware has rapidly become the most lucrative scheme in organized cybercriminals’ playbooks. So much of our modern world is dependent on digital infrastructure that any interruption to these services can put businesses in the unenviable position of having to either pay off the ransom to decrypt their systems, or risk greater losses in business while the systems remain inaccessible.
