Andrew Grotto, former Senior Director for Cybersecurity Policy for both Obama and Trump, in a piece for War on the Rocks called Cyber Security Derailed? Recommendations for Smarter Investments in Infrastructure:
A state-owned Chinese company receives a contract to build and maintain the next generation of railcars that service Metro stations at the Pentagon, near the White House and Capitol Hill, and throughout the Washington, D.C., metro area. What could possibly go wrong?
Possibly nothing, but maybe something.
Thoughtful pice about cyberthreats and our insufficient attempts to manage them. There are many kinds of threats, but I must admit that I hadn’t thought about this one before:
Connected infrastructure presents potentially target-rich environments for malicious cyber actors. For example, a bad actor could use malicious code to lock down and disable a critical system, and then demand payment as ransom for unlocking it — a common attack known as ransomware.
I wonder how big the ransom would be for a system like the Washington Metro.
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