Hacking the Russian Power Grid

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.3 • 107.7K Ratings

🗓️ 18 June 2019

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A New York Times investigation found that the United States is actively infiltrating Russia’s electric power grid. We look at what that means for the future of cyberwarfare. Guest: David E. Sanger, a national security correspondent for The New York Times and the author of “The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age.” For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Background reading: The cyberattacks on Russia’s power grid are intended partly as a warning, and partly to be poised to act if a major conflict broke out between Washington and Moscow.In response to The Times’s report, the Kremlin warned that American attacks could escalate into cyberwar.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From the New York Times, I'm Michael Bavaro. This is The Daily.
0:10.0	Today,
0:12.0	A Times investigation reveals that the United States is actively infiltrating Russia's electric power grid.
0:21.0	David Sengler on what that means for the future of cyber warfare.
0:32.0	It's Tuesday, June 18th.
0:39.0	So what happened in 2008 was the Russians did something pretty brilliant.
0:46.0	They dropped a bunch of USB keys. You know, the kind you might get at a convention or maybe it's given to you at a hotel.
0:53.0	In parking lots around American bases in the Middle East, people would pick these things up, bring them into work, and believe it or not, put them in their computers at work.
1:06.0	Somebody got away with the most serious breach of defense department computer networks ever.
1:11.0	And what happened was those keys essentially put some malware into computers that got the Russians inside something called Siprinet.
1:21.0	The drive contained malicious coding that spread through classified files and stole information.
1:25.0	The official name is the secret internet protocol router network.
1:30.0	But the main thing to know is it's the Pentagon secret network.
1:33.0	We didn't think that was possible because it's completely separate from the internet.
1:38.0	And suddenly they were able to drain out of the Pentagon some of its most secret communications, all because somebody picked up a USB and stuck in their machines.
1:54.0	And one day a woman named Debbie Plunkett came into the office at the NSA.
2:00.0	Remember this was just ahead of President Obama's election and she discovered this breach and basically she said we've got to get them out.
2:10.0	And this started a massive effort secretly inside the NSA to clean out the Department of Defense's systems.
2:18.0	In fact, after a while people began using super glue to seal the USB ports on Pentagon computers.
2:28.0	Wow, so that no idiot would go pick up a USB from someplace and put it in.
2:33.0	It was a low tech solution, Michael, but it worked.
2:36.0	So beyond super gluing the USB ports on computers inside the defense department, what is the response from the US to this incursion?
	...

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