Episode 197: The Russia Hack Is A 5 Alarm Fire | Also: Shoppers Beware!

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In this episode of the podcast (#197), sponsored by LastPass, former U.S. CISO General Greg Touhill joins us to talk about news of a vast hack of U.S. government networks, purportedly by actors affiliated with Russia. In our second segment, with online crime and fraud surging, Katie Petrillo of LastPass joins us to talk about how holiday shoppers can protect themselves – and their data – from cyber criminals.

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Every day this week has brought new revelations about the hack of U.S. Government networks by sophisticated cyber adversaries believed to be working for the Government of Russia. And each revelation, it seems, is worse than the one before – about a purported compromise of US government networks by Russian government hackers. As of Thursday, the U.S. Cyber Security and Infrastructure Security Agency CISA was dispensing with niceties, warning that it had determined that the Russian hackers “poses a grave risk to the Federal Government and state, local, tribal, and territorial governments as well as critical infrastructure entities and other private sector organizations”

The incident recalls another from the not-distant past: the devastating compromise of the Government’s Office of Personnel Management in 2014- an attack attributed to adversaries from China that exposed the government’s personnel records – some of its most sensitive data – to a foreign power. 

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Now this attack, which is so big it is hard to know what to call it. Unlike the 2014 incident it isn’t limited to a single federal agency. In fact, it isn’t even limited to the federal government: state, local and tribal governments have likely been affected, in addition to hundreds or thousands of private firms including Microsoft, which acknowledged Thursday that it had found instances of the software compromised by the Russians, the SolarWinds Orion product, in its environment. 

How did we get it so wrong? According to our guest this week, the failures were everywhere. Calls for change following OPM fell on deaf ears in Congress. But the government also failed to properly assess new risks – such as software supply chain attacks – as it deployed new applications and computing models. 

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Greg Touhill, is the President of the Federal Group of secure infrastructure company AppGate. he currently serves as a faculty member of Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College. In a prior life, Greg was a Brigadier General Greg Touhill and  the first Federal Chief Information Security Officer of the United States government. 

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In this conversation, General Touhill and I talk about the hack of the US government that has come to light, which he calls a “five alarm fire.” We also discuss the failures of policy and practice that led up to it and what the government can do to set itself on a new path. The federal government has suffered “paralysis through analysis” as it wrestled with the need to change its approach to security from outdated notions of a “hardened perimeter” and keeping adversaries out. “We’ve got to change our approach,” Touhill said.

The malls may be mostly empty this holiday season, but the Amazon trucks come and go with a shocking regularity. In pandemic plagued America, e-commerce has quickly supplanted brick and mortar stores as the go-to for consumers wary of catching a potentially fatal virus.