The current flap about (probably) Russian hackers getting into government and corporate networks in 2020 reminds me again how unbelievably incompetent the US government and US corporations have been at cybersecurity.
Just recall –
Wikileaks, founded by Julian Assange in December 2006, has dumped some 15 million pages of US confidential and/or classified documents on the web, including, ironically, in 2010 a secret Department of Defense counterintelligence report on Wikileaks itself.
Also in 2010, Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning (now Chelsea Manning) extracted from classified networks about 260,000 secret and confidential diplomatic cables, which he passed on to Wikileaks.
In 2013 Edward Snowden, an NSA analyst, managed to extract a unknown but large number of secret files and pass them to the Russians. His revelations included at least 15,000 Australian intelligence files, 58,000 British intelligence files, somewhere between 50,000 and 200,000 NSA documents, and some 900,000 Department of Defense documents.
Between 2010 and 2014 Chinese spy Stephen Su managed to steal 630,000 digital files from the Boeing Corporation on the design of the US Air force C-17 transport, covering almost every aspect of the design. That was enough for the Chinese to build their very own copy of the C-17, called the Y-20 transport.
Stephen Su also managed to steal about 220 megabytes of data from Lockheed Martin on the design of the F-22 fighter.
He also managed to steal from Lockheed Martin some unknown but large amount of data about our leading new fighter plane, the F-35. Enough data, anyway, that the Chinese were able to build the Chinese J-31 fighter, which appears to be an exact copy of the F-35.
In 2014 Target was hacked, revealing the financial information of 110 million customers. In the same year Home Depot lost the credit card data of 50 million customers, J.P. Morgan lost the account information of several million customers, and Sony Pictures was hacked.
In 2014 the US Office of Personnel Management was hacked by Chinese spy Yu Pingan, who stole about 22 million records of people working in government, and who had applied for security clearances.
In 2015 Hilton Hotels was hacked for the credit card information of all its chains across the country.
In 2016, (probably) Chinese hackers managed to steal the U.S. National Security Agency’s own prime hacking tools and has been using them against us.
Also in 2016, the SWIFT banking system was hacked (perhaps by the North Koreans) who got $81 million from the Bangladesh Central Bank’s account in the New York Federal Reserve.
In 2017 the Chipotle Restaurant chain was hacked for the credit card information of its customers all across the nation.
In 2018 Marriot hotels lost the information, including credit card information, on an estimated 500 million customers. Also in 2018 in the US alone T-mobile, Quora, Google, Saks and Lord & Taylor, and Facebook had major cyber security breaches.
In 2019 hackers breached at US Customs and Border Protection database, getting about 100,000 faces and license plates. Also in 2019, Capital One lost the credit card information of tens of millions of its customers.
And then in 2020 we had the major hacking that has been in the news lately. And these are only the major hackings; there have been tens of thousands of minor ones. And only the ones we know about. – the FBI estimates that we have probably detected only something like 10% of the hackings that have occurred.
Faced with this decade of debacles, one would have thought the US government and US corporations would have gone on a war footing and massively beefed up their cyber security. If they did, whatever they did has clearly been ineffective, as the current hacking scandal shows.
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