Tales Of Our Times
By JOHN BARTLIT
Los Alamos
The Los Alamos Daily Post adds a touch to national news about cyber scams, hacks, and data breaches. The local paper offers the “Catch Of The Week” by Rebecca Rutherford, an information technologist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Her columns clarify the types of damage willfully done by cyber villains. That focus spurs questions that are little heard in today’s constant election season.
An ancient Chinese militarist famously advised, “Know your enemy and know yourself.” The cases featured in “Catch” are mini studies in the art of cyber attacks. Recent alerts offer telltale glimpses inside the smoky bunkers and spooky jargon of the world’s scamming culture. From May 18, catch these lines: “Black Basta is a native Russian speaking group that’s been active since 2022 operating under the RaaS model – that’s Ransomware as a Service. Their business model is- crime!”
The catch of May 20 tells these details:
On April 29, the website Daily Dark Web reported that a hacking forum was advertising “customer and other information of systems purchased from Dell between 2017 and 2024.” … “the bad actor created several ‘partner’ accounts on a Dell service portal, and used these accounts to brute-force guess Dell customer service ticket IDs. According to the bad actor, he sent 5,000 requests per minute to the Dell portal. According to him, he kept doing this for nearly 3 weeks and Dell didn’t notice anything.”
In April, AARP supplied similar scary details about a larger data breach at AT&T, another digital giant. In mid-June, giant Microsoft testified to a House committee about ways that Chinese hackers stole U.S. cyberdata. Whoa!
These eerie pursuits train actors, both the bad and good, in the scamming culture. Yet, baddies come in many shades. Elsewhere in the culture are artsy cyber vandals. Digital vandals have a simpler aim in mind—chaos for the sheer joy of it.
All told, “Catch Of The Week” is a storehouse of helpful lessons for everyday people. Skills in creative disruption force skills in creative protection. And so forth: 1) Good guys find better ways to block each scam that shows up. 2) So the bad guys find better twists to bust the blockades. 3) The criminal vocations continue to thrive. 4) The den of thieves keeps trading its ill-gotten gains at a busy marketplace known as the dark web. 5) Good guys find … etc.
I claim no expertise in cybersecurity nor its jargon. My skills are enough to raise needed questions, though I cannot supply complete answers. Almost surely no single person has the best, complete answers to all the key questions. Founders of our American democracy were moved to build this basic belief into the Constitution. Likewise, my headline asks questions designed to stir public discussion. I end with more questions.
Digital voter rolls contain names and personal data on millions of registered voters. The whole point of the cunning data breaches at Dell and AT&T was to access millions of people’s names and their personal data. Are voter rolls somehow different from those rolls? Are the data in voter rolls of no interest to scammers, not even to fun-loving vandals? Or do voter rolls have better or different cybersecurity than company rolls? When digital giants are so trickable, will politicos stay safe with all their different voting rules in different states?
States differ in wanting easier voter access or added security. Voting needs both. Hackers just want havoc.
Would more focus on voter rolls increase efforts to hack them? Or would more focus on hacking lead to better cybersecurity? In short, do baddies or good guys think more about cyber threats to voter rolls?
The race of skills requires the good and bad to keep overtaking the other. Each one needs to catch up sooner, not later. How many hackers, domestic and foreign, have schemes afoot for taking personal data from voter rolls for profit or mischief? Have their schemes yet taken to ultra fast guessing or to swamping voter sites via artificial intelligence?
So, what’s yet to do?
