Tales Of Our Times
By JOHN BARTLIT
New Mexico Citizens
for Clean Air & Water

Ancient Persia had a place on history’s pathway that brought the technology and culture of acequias for water usage from the Middle East to Morocco to Moorish Spain and eventually to hundreds of villages in Northern New Mexico. An “acequia” is a ditch system of irrigation that works by gravity and to this day is still managed by its users. The name itself goes back thousands of years to the Arabic.

But aspects change. Modern Iran is pure trouble for the more recent water systems in our nation. To update us, the U.S. EPA offers a two-hour virtual briefing at the end of February in New Mexico. The topic is the abyss of cyber (computer based) threats to our nation’s 150,000 public water supplies and wastewater treatment plants. 

Cybervillains thrive around the globe in varied forms. Some cyberthugs are affiliated with nations, most notably Iran, China, and Russia. Others amount to terrorists, revengers,  freelance gangs, or lone profiteers. Countless bad sorts stay busy launching new cyberthreats. The task of cybersecurity is to prevent and defeat the new threats they hatch.

The spread of cyberthreats to our nation’s water boosts the needs for cybersecurity. The bulky listing of program sponsors for the virtual briefing on water systems includes teams whose names are seldom heard in one place. The listed partners are: cyber parts of the EPA, the Water Sharing and Analysis Center, the FBI, and two parts of Homeland Security—the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the Office of Intelligence and Analysis. Point made.

Water facilities, like other facilities of our times, are more and more digitized to promote automation. More digitized systems offer more targets for cyberattacks. A handful of examples will clarify the trends and muddle the slang and know-how.

Anywhere big-time scams loom large, “ransomware” is often in the picture. The “ransom” part is old enough to give most generations a useful sense of what ransomware is all about. But if we dare dig deeper, we are, like young Alice, soon in a wonderland where words are twisted weirdly.

To catch the twists in scammers’ jargon, search at “Ransomware Wikipedia”. The first paragraph there reports: Ransomware is a type of malware that encrypts the victim’s personal data until a ransom is paid. They commonly use difficult-to-trace digital currencies such as paysafecard or Bitcoin for the ransoms, making tracing and prosecuting the perpetrators difficult.

Reading more, the history of scamming gets harder to follow in sentences like these:

• Some payloads consist simply of an application designed to lock or restrict the system until payment is made, typically by setting the Windows Shell to itself, or even modifying the master boot record and/or partition table to prevent the operating system from booting until it is repaired.
• By mid-2006, Trojans such as Gpcode, TROJ.RANSOM.A, Archiveus, Krotten, Cryzip, and MayArchive began utilizing more sophisticated RSA encryption schemes, with ever-increasing key sizes.
• In 2012, a major ransomware Trojan known as Reveton began to spread. Based on the Citadel Trojan (which, itself, is based on the Zeus Trojan), its payload displays a warning purportedly from a law enforcement agency claiming that the computer has been used for illegal activities, such as downloading unlicensed software or child pornography.
• Oct. 24, 2017, some users in Russia and Ukraine reported a new ransomware attack, named “Bad Rabbit”, which follows a similar pattern to WannaCry and Petya by encrypting the user’s file tables and then demands a Bitcoin payment to decrypt them.

In its upcoming presentation, the EPA distills these dark waters into its core topics:

• Potential threats to critical infrastructure (cyber and physical)
• What to do in the event of a cyber or physical intrusion
• Water security and preparedness products and services.