2020 has already been a WILD year to say the least – opening with the assassination of Qasem Soleimani, proceeding through multiple ecological crisis, and continuing with a historical pandemic (and all its implications for information security), we live in very interesting times indeed. And yet, we’ve only just begun! Read more…
My country, the United States, has experienced days of disruption and discord not witnessed since the late 1960s across multiple municipalities and regions. Adequately parsing and analyzing these events, their motivations, and what lasting impacts they may have will be the work for others. Instead, these chaotic events identify a Read more…
Two recent articles appeared concerning possible implications of or prompts for the 01 May 2020 Executive Order on the US electric system. Notably, the Executive Order was quickly followed by a US Department of Commerce investigation into the supply of electrical transformers. While the latter would appear related to typical Read more…
The obvious story as of this writing is the slow-motion catastrophe of the novel coronavirus referred to as COVID19. While the medical struggle around this pathogen is harrowing and full of heroes (and villians), another struggle has emerged more in line with the political and economic consequences of this disease. Read more…
Late 02 January 2020 (US Eastern time), the United States launched a strike outside Baghdad airport killing Qasem Soleimani, Iranian general and leader of the paramilitary Qods Force. General Soleimani was a despicable person responsible for promoting conflict and prolonging strife in various areas of the Middle East (among other Read more…
One issue that came from my recent CYBERWARCON talk was an item of focus (or for others, limitation) when approaching the idea of what a “critical infrastructure attack” actually means. While I faced some (really good, topical) questions on my definition of “critical infrastructure”, a more public debate ensued over Read more…
On 24 November 2019, WikiLeaks posted an email, purportedly from a whistleblower on the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) team assigned to investigate the chemical weapons attack on the Syrian city of Douma. I will let readers find the original WikiLeaks post, but the story was promptly Read more…
The most frustrating type of bad argument to refute are those which feature or rest upon a kernel of truth. In the worst, most-annoying scenario, one must deal with a counterparty that simply reasserts their position without hesitation resembling the chess-playing pigeon of Internet fame. More worrying still is that Read more…
Reuters reported on an interesting event from September 2019 today (16 October 2019): “The United States carried out a secret cyber operation against Iran in the wake of the Sept. 14 attacks on Saudi Arabia’s oil facilities, which Washington and Riyadh blame on Tehran, two U.S. officials have told Reuters. Read more…
I am writing this only a few days removed from Black Hat 2019 and Def Con 27, where both events featured a number of presentations on critical infrastructure or industrial control system (ICS) threats – but with a continuing lack of scope (or imagination) for the threat landscape. While identifying Read more…