Please, please, please, keep this thread on topic. If you want to go off topic, start a new topic. Just simple questions which have to be asked and answered by the people - not politicians. Who is responsible for the recent ransom attacks on American companies (Colonial Pipeline - JBS Foods)? Is it the Russian government? Is it Russian hackers? Is it Russian hackers sanctioned by the Russian Government? or Is it the US companies who failed to secure their network and failed to provide for immediate recovery of a ransomware attack? Who do you think is going to really pay for those ransomware attacks? The corporation, or the consumer? Is this just another case of no one accepting responsibility? Thank you.
One of the first things I thought about was, (but admittedly I'm no computer wiz), why don't these companies have a back-up software system so that if they were to get hacked and shut-down by a ransomware attack, they couldn't simply switch to the back-up system and carry on as usual? What am I missing here? It scares the hell out of me that someday somebody's going to attack our electrical grid!
You ask questions with seemingly simple answers, but the situation is far from simple. First, there are literally millions of people, mostly in eastern Europe and Asia, who are hackers of varying degrees of competence -- but many are highly educated people who are easily as knowledgeable as anyone we rely on to thwart hacking. They often belong to groups/companies with wealth that support their activities and shield them from authorities. Many have govt backing. Second, the devices compromised aren't always just "computers" per se -- ie, PCs and mainframes. Computers are also incorporated into devices themselves(valves, switches, engines, phones, etc). Eg, if you own a recent vintage car it likely has between 30 and 100 little computers controlling everything, from the engine, brakes, etc. to the radio. These computers communicate with one another via wires, radio, internet, etc to form distributed information/control systems. Google, reportedly, has over a million computers online to provide their services -- thus there are many points that can be targeted to infiltrate/disrupt most system. Third, the "hack" may actually have started years ago with software inserted that lay dormant until activated recently -- many of our infrastructure systems (rail, air traffic, etc.) are decades old because politicians/taxpayers won't fund their upgrades. My 2-cents: Security cost money, yet we consumers want inexpensive goods/services. Businesses want maximum profits so they cut corners. And everyone thinks government (who certainly has the duty to protect us) should butt out of most things. We as a society want everything optimized around us, the individual, but then we complain when the govt or a corporation fails to protect us. We can't have it both ways. In the end, we have allowed this to happen -- we are the ones responsible.
