What Goes Around, Euro Style

15 Monday Jul 2019

Posted by perrinlovett in News and Notes

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cyber warfare, EU, Europe, GPS, hacking, spying

Galileo is down, God help the EU. The ~~spy~~ “navigation” system is offline, has been, and questions abound. A cyber attack?

Galileo, the EU’s global navigation satellite system, has been down for four days, since July 11, following a mysterious outage. All Galileo satellites are still non-operational, at the time of writing.

According to a service status page, 24 of the 26 Galileo satellites are listed as “not usable,” while the other two are listing a status of “testing,” which also means they’re not ready for real-world usage.

The European GNSS Agency (GSA), the organization in charge of Galileo, has not published any information in regards to the root of the outage, which began four days ago, on Thursday, July 11.

On that day, the GSA published an advisory on its website alerting companies and government agencies employing the Galileo system that satellite signals have degraded and they “may not be available nor meet the minimum performance levels.”

The agency warned that the Galileo system “should be employed at users’ own risk.”

That admonishment sounds par for the standard operating course. Most haven’t heard of this system before, nor do they care now. I first learned of it nearly 20 years ago, at a Federalist Society luncheon in DC. A friend from Germany, a then-JD candidate already possessed of a Ph.D. is computer science something, wouldn’t stop talking about it. We all have our issues. He warned me bluntly that the EU was setting up something far beyond GPS and that they were intent on maintaining secrecy. He said, and I believed him, that his attempts to access information about the then-fledgling project, resulted in his computer being “zapped” repeatedly. They did it to him. Someone has done it to them. And, the world turns…

Russian Interference

15 Saturday Jun 2019

Posted by perrinlovett in Legal/Political Columns

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cyber warfare, entanglements, poking the bear, Russia, War

Found it! Well, there’s ample evidence of the Empire meddling in Russia, to be more specific. Attacking nuclear-armed Russia’s power grid. What could go wrong?

The United States is stepping up digital incursions into Russia’s electric power grid in a warning to President Vladimir V. Putin and a demonstration of how the Trump administration is using new authorities to deploy cybertools more aggressively, current and former government officials said.

In interviews over the past three months, the officials described the previously unreported deployment of American computer code inside Russia’s grid and other targets as a classified companion to more publicly discussed action directed at Moscow’s disinformation and hacking units around the 2018 midterm elections.

Advocates of the more aggressive strategy said it was long overdue, after years of public warnings from the Department of Homeland Security and the F.B.I. that Russia has inserted malware that could sabotage American power plants, oil and gas pipelines or water supplies in any future conflict with the United States.

But it also carries significant risk of escalating the daily digital Cold War between Washington and Moscow.

The administration declined to describe specific actions it was taking under the new authorities, which were granted separately by the White House and Congress last year to United States Cyber Command, the arm of the Pentagon that runs the military’s offensive and defensive operations in the online world.

But in a public appearance on Tuesday, President Trump’s national security adviser, John R. Bolton, said the United States was now taking a broader view of potential digital targets as part of an effort “to say to Russia, or anybody else that’s engaged in cyberoperations against us, ‘You will pay a price.’”

Power grids have been a low-intensity battleground for years.

Since at least 2012, current and former officials say, the United States has put reconnaissance probes into the control systems of the Russian electric grid.

They started retaliating in 2012 for a problem that manifested in ~~2016~~ 2018. For once the US government thinks forward. And, one could have guessed about Bolton’s involvement even without the reading. These fools may end up getting that war they’ve wanted for so long. Rest assured, you’ll get the (massive) tab.