Hack attacks
EDITOR'S NOTE
You're a dentist. You've done pretty well for yourself. You've built up a decent local practice. You've spent ten, fifteen years growing your patient base; you've handed over a lot of the day-to-day billing and paperwork to your office admin and a third-party software company that helps you with back office. You're starting to enjoy the fruits of all your hard work over the past twenty years.
Then you get a frantic call from the office this morning; your computer systems are down. Can't get patient info. Can't access your calendar to even know which patients to tell not to come in today. It's a ransomware attack--and they didn't even target you, they targeted your software vendors. And it keeps happening to dentist offices. Four hundred practices in August 2019. A hundred more that fall. And apparently, dentist and accounting offices may again have been caught up in the biggest-yet ransomware attack over the weekend.
You may have seen the headlines--a $70 million ransom demanded by an affiliate of the notorious "REvil" group that got $11 million from meat-processor JBS over the Memorial Day holiday weekend. Just vicious stuff. They don't even target "big corporate"--they targeted a little firm called Kaseya that makes software tools for companies that handle back-office work for other small companies.
(Ironically, Kaseya's "VSA" software, which was targeted, pitches itself as a way of protecting small business software systems. Per their website: "Proactively resolve IT incidents and automate common IT processes, including software deployment, patch management, antivirus and antimalware (AV/AM) deployment, and routine maintenance.")
Anyhow, nearly a month after the November 2019 hack, one pediatric dentist's office still only had two out of its four locations up and running, and patient charts still hadn't been fully recovered. And that was with the help of a cybersecurity insurance company! Most businesses don't even have that kind of help with these attacks, and they're being forced out of business. Again, that example was from a pediatric dentist. Helping little kids who come in to get their teeth cleaned.
So you can only imagine the kind of havoc these attacks are wreaking on the heart and soul of American enterprise. At least big companies can fall back on capital markets or bank loans in a pinch if they need funds quickly to weather a shutdown. Smaller owners basically only have their savings, their home equity, or their retirement accounts (if that). And this comes after Covid has already wreaked havoc on them! It's absolutely cruel.
So we had the big Geneva summit where President Biden reportedly warned Vladimir Putin that the U.S. would retaliate ('How would you feel if ransomware took on the pipelines from your oil fields?') if Russia was seen as backing another major ransomware attack like the one that shut down the Colonial Pipeline. But expert Tom Kellermann called it last month when he said he expected the summit to "diminish" attacks against critical U.S. infrastructure, but "possibly increase against traditional corporations."
So unless we tie "REvil" to the Kremlin directly, and respond forcefully, the U.S. is going to do...what, exactly, to end this ransomware plague? If these groups are all operating in some unaffiliated "grey zone," whether vaguely tied to Russia or any other country or no country at all, can we do nothing to stop them or to respond in kind?
If we don't come up with something, fast, I'm going to get fully on board with Lee Reiners of Duke Law, who in late May wrote an op-ed in the WSJ saying we should ban cryptocurrency to fight ransomware. I assumed that would be a ludicrous, counterproductive approach, but when I asked David Kennedy of TrustedSec about that on air last week (I can't find the clip now), he shocked me by saying that actually, banning crypto would stop ransomware attacks.
The rub? Before the ban went into effect, the attacks would reach a fever pitch as hackers scrambled for every last dollar. And companies who could no longer pay the ransom without breaking the law would be left paralyzed. So fine--ban it, crack down on using it as payment, however you need to slice it--at midnight tonight. Or at 4 p.m., after the markets close. Or right now. Basically, just do it with zero warning, with a carveout for those already trying to resolve an attack.
My friends who work in crypto will think I've completely lost it, but maybe Lee Reiners is right; we can either have crypto or we can not have ransomware, but we can't have both.
See you at 1 p.m!
Kelly KEY STORIES
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