Day: June 8, 2021

The top executive for the biggest fuel pipeline operator in the United States told lawmakers he felt like he had no choice but to pay off hackers after a ransomware attack shut down operations along the East Coast. Testifying Tuesday before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Colonial Pipeline Chief Executive Joseph Blount took responsibility for agreeing to pay the Russian-based DarkSide Network approximately $5 million to minimize potentially disastrous delays to fuel delivery. “I know how critical our pipeline is to the country, and I put the interests of the country first,” Blount said. “It was the hardest decision I’ve made in my 39 years in the energy industry,” he added. “We wanted to stay focused on getting the pipeline back up and running. I believe with all my heart it was the right choice to make.” The May 7 DarkSide ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline spawned fuel shortages and panic-buying across parts of the U.S., pushing prices higher as drivers hunted for gas stations that had not run out of fuel. FILE – A man with a gas container greets a motorist waiting in a lengthy line to enter a gasoline station during a surge in the demand for fuel following the cyberattack that crippled the Colonial Pipeline, in Durham, North Carolina, May 12, 2021.U.S. law enforcement, including cyber experts at the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), routinely warn companies against paying ransoms to hackers. But Blount said that even though the company was in contact with the FBI, he felt paying DarkSide was the most prudent option. “It was our understanding that the decision was solely ours as a private company,” he told lawmakers. “Considering the consequences of potentially not bringing the pipeline back on as quickly as I possibly could, I chose the ransom.” Blount said Colonial did not deal with DarkSide directly and instead hired legal experts and negotiators to act as intermediaries. The payment was delivered May 8 to the ransomware network in the form of the bitcoin cryptocurrency.  In return, DarkSide provided Colonial with a decryption key that helped the company regain access to its systems and eventually resume operations, Blount said, noting that some systems are just now coming back online. Blount’s testimony comes just a day after the U.S. Justice Department and the FBI announced that they managed to track the ransom and recover the majority of the bitcoin, which was valued at about $2.3 million.  FILE – A Colonial Pipeline station is seen in Smyrna, Ga., near Atlanta, May 11, 2021.Other experts worry that companies, organizations and governments, like Colonial Pipeline, are putting themselves at a disadvantage. “With ransomware, the misconception is that there’s two options: pay criminals or don’t pay criminals,” said Raj Samani, co-founder of No More Ransom, an organization that distributes decryption keys for free. “Many of the decryptors that are developed by the ransomware groups are actually rubbish,” said Samani, who is also the chief scientist at McAfee, a U.S.-based cybersecurity company. “So, even if you pay a fee, you may not get your data back.” In the case of the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack, the decryption key did allow the company to start getting some systems up and running.   “It’s not a perfect tool,” Blount told lawmakers Tuesday, adding that the company is working to further harden its cyber defenses. Blount said DarkSide was able to access Colonial’s systems by exploiting a virtual private network (VPN) that was no longer in use and which was protected only by a single password. CISA recommends using what is known as multifactor authentication, which requires users use a password and then complete a second step, such as replying to a text message, in order to access critical systems. 
 
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The World Meteorological Organization, the United Nations climate agency, reported Tuesday that Europe saw its coldest March through May since 2013, with temperatures 0.45 C below the 1991-2020 average.During a briefing from the agency’s headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, WMO spokesperson Clare Nullis cautioned that Europe’s cool start did not reflect any pause in the world’s climate change problems.In fact, data from the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service show that the global average temperature for May was 0.26 C higher than the 1991-2020 mean, according to the U.N. News website.  Greenhouse Gases Threaten Ocean Ecosystems: WMOThe ocean absorbs around 23 percent of the annual atmospheric emissions of carbon dioxide and acts as a buffer against climate changeAlso according to U.N. News: “Temperatures were well above average over western Greenland, north Africa, the Middle East and northern and western Russia while below-average May temperatures were reported over the southern and central United States, parts of northern Canada, south-central Africa, most of India, eastern Russia, and eastern Antarctica.”  Nullis said there was also “quite a considerable rise” in carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere at the Mauna Loa Observatory, an atmospheric monitoring station operated by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association in Hawaii.She said, “The fact CO2 does have such a long lifetime in the atmosphere does mean that future generations — and we’re not just talking about one or two, we’re talking about many generations — will be committed to seeing more impacts of climate change.”  Nullis warned rising CO2 levels will also have a “very serious impact” on the planet’s oceans, which absorb almost a quarter of CO2 emissions. 
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Pfizer says it will expand testing of its COVID-19 vaccine to children younger than 12.  The drug company, along with its German partner BioNTech, will enroll 4,500 children volunteers at more than 90 places in the U.S., Finland, Poland and Spain.  The children, ages 5 to 11, will be given two doses of 10 micrograms each, which is about a third of the dose used on teens and adults. Some will receive placebo shots.  Testing on infants as young as 6 months will start within weeks. They will receive 3-microgram doses. The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine already has been given authorization for emergency use for those 12 and older in the U.S. and Europe. 
 
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A number of major websites could not be reached early Tuesday following an outage at the cloud services company Fastly.The affected sites included news agencies CNN, the Guardian and the New York Times, streaming platform Twitch, and the U.K. government’s website.All were back online within a period of hours.Fastly said it identified an issue and that “and a fix is being implemented.”The company earlier said it was “investigating potential impact to performance with our CDN services.”
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Apple on Monday said a new “private relay” feature designed to obscure a user’s web browsing behavior from internet service providers and advertisers will not be available in China for regulatory reasons.The feature was one of a number of privacy protections Apple announced at its annual software developer conference Monday.It will also be unavailable in Belarus, Colombia, Egypt, Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Turkmenistan, Uganda and the Philippines, Apple said.The “private relay” feature first sends web traffic to a server maintained by Apple, where it is stripped of its IP address. From there, Apple sends the traffic to a second server maintained by a third-party operator who assigns the user a temporary IP address and sends the traffic onward to its destination website.The use of an outside party in the second hop of the relay system is intentional, Apple said, to prevent even Apple from knowing both the user’s identity and what website the user is visiting.Apple has not yet disclosed which outside partners it will use in the system but said it plans to disclose them in the future. The feature will not likely become available to the public until later this year. 
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The annual peak of global heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the air has reached another dangerous milestone: 50% higher than when the industrial age began.And the average rate of increase is faster than ever, scientists reported Monday.The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said the average carbon dioxide level for May was 419.13 parts per million. That’s 1.82 parts per million higher than May 2020 and 50% higher than the stable pre-industrial levels of 280 parts per million, said NOAA climate scientist Pieter Tans.Carbon dioxide levels peak every May just before plant life in the Northern Hemisphere blossoms, sucking some of that carbon out of the atmosphere and into flowers, leaves, seeds and stems. The reprieve is temporary, though, because emissions of carbon dioxide from burning coal, oil and natural gas for transportation and electricity far exceed what plants can take in, pushing greenhouse gas levels to new records every year.”Reaching 50% higher carbon dioxide than preindustrial is really setting a new benchmark, and not in a good way,” said Cornell University climate scientist Natalie Mahowald, who wasn’t part of the research. “If we want to avoid the worst consequences of climate change, we need to work much harder to cut carbon dioxide emissions and right away.”Climate change does more than increase temperatures. It makes extreme weather — storms, wildfires, floods and droughts — worse and more frequent, and causes oceans to rise and get more acidic, studies show. There are also health effects, including heat deaths and increased pollen. In 2015, countries signed the Paris agreement to try to keep climate change to below what’s considered dangerous levels.The one-year jump in carbon dioxide was not a record, mainly because of a La Nina weather pattern, when parts of the Pacific temporarily cool, said Ralph Keeling, Scripps Institution of Oceanography geochemist. Keeling’s father started the monitoring of carbon dioxide on top of the Hawaiian mountain Mauna Loa in 1958, and he has continued the work of charting the now famous Keeling Curve.Scripps, which calculates the numbers slightly differently based on time and averaging, said the peak in May was 418.9.Also, pandemic lockdowns slowed transportation, travel and other activity by about 7%, earlier studies show. But that was too small to make a significant difference. Carbon dioxide can stay in the air for 1,000 years or more, so year-to-year changes in emissions don’t register much.The 10-year average rate of increase also set a record, now up to 2.4 parts per million per year.”Carbon dioxide going up in a few decades like that is extremely unusual,” Tans said. “For example, when the Earth climbed out of the last ice age, carbon dioxide increased by about 80 parts per million, and it took the Earth system, the natural system, 6,000 years. We have a much larger increase in the last few decades.”By comparison, it has taken only 42 years, from 1979 to 2021, to increase carbon dioxide by that same amount.”The world is approaching the point where exceeding the Paris targets and entering a climate danger zone becomes almost inevitable,” said Princeton University climate scientist Michael Oppenheimer, who wasn’t part of the research.
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