There’s little new about the Colonial pipeline security disaster; nearly everything was business as usual: expensive but ineffective cyber-security systems and people; penetration and massive data stolen secretly; learning about the breach when ransomware popped up and said “pay me;” shutting everything down; taking days to recover; and the government, which is incapable of protecting itself, making solemn statements about “helping” more.
Colonial did manage to stand out from its fellow victims in a couple of ways: unlike many victims, they paid the big ransom; and their shutdown hurt millions of normal people in significant ways.
The other way Colonial stood out is remarkable: it was big news in the media for days, while the many “successful” ransomware attacks that take place each and every day on businesses, governments, schools and hospitals are rarely made public, much less make the news. Cars being unable to get gas in multiple states, even at inflated prices, may have had something to do with it...
Colonial Pipeline in Context
As usual in disasters of this kind, many important details of the attack and the response to it are closely-guarded secrets.
Let's step back and put what we do know about the disaster in context.
Ransomware has been around for a couple decades. It was usually sent to consumer emails with threats of various kinds if a ransom wasn’t paid. The ransom amount was usually under $1,000 and was paid to prepaid cards and other places. Because of the ability to trace the payment, the scam became less profitable and more dangerous for the criminals involved.
Then bitcoin came along. By 2013 exchanges appeared that enabled criminals to receive instant payments while remaining anonymous and untraceable. Why attack consumers for small amounts when you can get into a large institution and demand large amounts that you can receive instantly and anonymously anywhere on the globe? The threat evolved as well. The attacking software, after gaining entry into the target’s internal computer network, would encrypt all the data, making the organization’s computers nonfunctional until the data was unencrypted using a key known only to the criminals. The victim would be stalled in place, unable to function until the ransom was paid or the computers were otherwise restored. The use of ransomware exploded.
While the well-paid but ineffective defenders sloppily applied what they were taught in school and followed the thousands of pages of security-related regulations, the criminals evolved on multiple fronts. Ransomware evolved rapidly during 2020. The criminal attackers started to take a copy of the target’s data (exfiltrate it) before locking it up. The threat evolved to: if you don’t pay us we’ll make all your data public and you’ll be locked up.
Industry expert EMSISoft tells us: “As the year progressed, more and more groups started to exfiltrate data, using the threat of releasing the stolen information as additional leverage to extort payment. At the beginning of 2020, only the Maze group used this tactic. By the end of the year, at least 17 others had adopted it and were publishing stolen data on so-called leak sites.”
Oh, expose the data — how bad can that be? Pretty bad. “The data that was published included Protected Health Information (PHI), sensitive information related to school children, and police records related to ongoing investigations.”
What? These sound like highly regulated hospitals and government organizations, even law enforcement. Isn't the government, which creates and sometimes enforces all these cyber-security regulations able to protect itself? I guess not: “Unfortunately the barrage continued into 2020 with at least 2,254 US governments, healthcare facilities and schools being impacted. The impacted organizations included 113 federal, state and municipal governments and agencies, 560 healthcare facilities, 1,681 schools, colleges and universities.”
Colleges and universities? Aren't these the places that train all these cyber-security people and create the theory and practice they all learn and put into practice, with their fancy degrees? How is it possible that the security experts can't keep themselves secure? And just look at those numbers: more than four per day were hit and hurt!
On the other hand, it's just people's data getting exposed and ransoms being paid, right? Sadly it’s more than embarrassment: “The attacks caused significant, and sometimes life-threatening, disruption: ambulances carrying emergency patients had to be redirected, cancer treatments were delayed, lab test results were inaccessible, hospital employees were furloughed and 911 services were interrupted.”
More than an attack a day took place at healthcare facilities! Have you seen any headlines about that?
Alright, alright, this is all about governments and similar institutions. Commercial companies want to protect their profits and their reputations. They probably handle things much better — they must, because you almost never hear about them. Ummmm, maybe not; again from EMSISoft: “The private sector was hit hard too. Globally, more than 1,300 companies, many US-based, lost data including intellectual property and other sensitive information. Note, this is simply the number of companies which had data published on leak sites and takes no account of the companies which paid to prevent publication. Multiple companies in the US Defense Industrial Base sector also had data stolen, including a contractor which supports the Minuteman III nuclear missile program.”
Read that last sentence again, please. The bad guys are successful in stealing even from defense contractors. And the number above is the tip of the iceberg, because it's just the ones where someone was able to find their data for sale — it doesn't count all the ones who paid up, hushed it up, etc. Somebody did a survey to find out just how widespread the problem was in commercial businesses. Here's the bad news: “according to a study by security firm Sophos, 51 percent of all surveyed businesses were hit by ransomware in 2020.”
The iceberg is indeed huge. We're talking serious money given to criminals. From Pentest Magazine: “By the end of 2019, cybercriminals using ransomware had made off with a reported $11.5 billion in ransom payments. By the end of 2020, that number is projected to reach $20 billion.”
That's "just" the ransom money — much more money is spent recovering from the attack, even if the ransom is paid.
With all that bad stuff going on and the FBI and other agencies devoting huge resources to it, at least some of the bad guys are being caught and punished, right? No. According to EMSISoft “the effective enforcement rate for cybercrime in the US is estimated at only about 0.05%.”
In case you're not feeling math-y, let me help. This means that out of each 2,000 cybercrimes, only one is prosecuted.
Conclusion
The Colonial Pipeline event was extremely rare — not that it happened, since about half of all businesses get hit with ransomware every year — but because it made the news and was widely covered.
The reality is that, largely invisible to the public, there are gangs of criminals roving secretly and largely unchecked through our computer systems and networks stealing valuables and extorting money in huge volumes. Business and government spend increasing amounts of money with ever-growing staffs of highly educated, certified professionals to prevent the on-going pillaging. They are failing. Horribly. The vast majority of the "cures" that are batted about will definitely cause everyone involved to spend more money, and will equally certainly make little difference.
I have discussed the issues and illustrated the problems and solutions but it won't make a difference — all the power and prestige go, as usual, to people who are proven ponderous pontificators to whom the entire realm of software is invisible.
Note: This was originally published in Forbes.
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