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Does Maersk Count as US Critical Infrastructure?

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I Back when Sony Pictures got hacked after Sony Everything Else had been hacked serially over the course of 15 years, the US government declared that multinational studio owned by a Japanese parent US critical infrastructure entitled to heightened cybersecurity protection. That’s one of the bases for which the US imposed sanctions on North Korea. The designation also ramped up the ways in which FBI could help Sony.

The listing of a multinational movie studio as critical infrastructure led many people to understand just how broad the definition of CI is in the US, including (in the same Commercial Facilities Sector) a bunch of things that might better be called soft targets.

  • Entertainment and Media (e.g., motion picture studios, broadcast media).
  • Gaming (e.g., casinos).
  • Lodging (e.g., hotels, motels, conference centers).
  • Outdoor Events (e.g., theme and amusement parks, fairs, campgrounds, parades).
  • Public Assembly (e.g., arenas, stadiums, aquariums, zoos, museums, convention centers).
  • Real Estate (e.g., office and apartment buildings, condominiums, mixed use facilities, self-storage).
  • Retail (e.g., retail centers and districts, shopping malls).
  • Sports Leagues (e.g., professional sports leagues and federations).

That’s when I learned that DHS was on the hook for protecting Yogi Bear Jellystone and KOA campground facilities around the country from cyberattack.

Since 2014, DHS belatedly added one thing to its critical infrastructure designation: elections. Though DHS doesn’t appear to have updated the website to reflect that designation yet (though maybe I’m missing it; I’ll call tomorrow to ask them where it is).

Anyway, the global impact of the NotPetya (which I’ll henceforth call Nyetna, because that’s my favorite name for it) attack, particularly its impact on Danish shipping giant Maersk, has me wondering whether anything Nyetna affected counts as would count as critical infrastructure. The impact on Maersk has had significant effect at several ports in the US.

Danish shipping giant A.P. Moller-Maersk, one of the global companies hardest hit by the malware, said Thursday that most of its terminals are now operational, though some terminals are “operating slower than usual or with limited functionality.”

Problems have been reported across the shippers’ global business, from Mobile, Alabama, to Mumbai in India. When The Associated Press visited the latter city’s Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust on Thursday, for example, it witnessed several hundred containers piled up at just two yards, out of more than a dozen yards surrounding the port.

“The vessels are coming, the ships are coming, but they are not able to take the container because all the systems are down,” trading and clearing agent Rajeshree Verma told the AP. “The port authorities, they are not able to reply (to) us. The shipping companies they also don’t know what to do. … We are actually in a fix because of all this.”

Probably the most important impact was on Maersk’s terminal in LA.

A cyberattack that infected computers across Europe and then spread into the United States halted operations at the Port of Los Angeles’ largest terminal Tuesday — and raised worries that destructive software could ricochet around the world and disrupt the critical supply chain.

APM Terminals — where Danish shipping carrier A.P. Moller-Maersk operates — turned truckers away all day, as did their terminals in Rotterdam, New York and New Jersey.

So does Maersk, and the 18% of global container shipping business it carries, count as US critical infrastructure?

Given that Maersk, not the several ports affected, is the victim, it’s not clear. Here’s how DHS defines the CI aspect of maritime shipping.

  • Maritime Transportation System consists of about 95,000 miles of coastline, 361 ports, more than 25,000 miles of waterways, and intermodal landside connections that allow the various modes of transportation to move people and goods to, from, and on the water.

But if Sony can count as US CI, it seems Maersk (or any comparable shipping giant) should as well.

It may not matter, as the Executive Branch seems to be hiding even further under their bed than they were after the WannaCry attack, with this being the one mention of the hack from the White House.

SECRETARY PERRY:  So let’s get over on the grid.  Obviously, the Department of Energy has a both scientific, they have a historic reason to be involved with that.  One is that, at one of our national labs, we have a test grid of which we are able to go out — one of the reasons that the Department of Homeland Security and DOE is involved with grid security is that DOE operates a substantial grid — a test grid, if you will — where we can go out and actually break things.  We can infest it with different viruses and what have you to be able to analyze how we’re going to harden our grid so that Americans can know that our country is doing everything that it can to protect, defend this country against either cyberattacks that would affect our electrical security or otherwise.

So the ability for us to be able to continue to lead the world — I think we all know the challenges.  We saw the reports as late as today of what’s going on in Ukraine.  And so protecting this country, its grid against not just cyber, but also against physical attacks, against attacks that may come from Mother Nature, weather-related events — all of that is a very important part of what DOE, DHS is doing together.

DHS is preoccupied rolling out Muslim Ban 3.0 and other flight restrictions.

By all appearances, Nyetna primarily targeted Ukraine. But in hitting Ukraine, it significantly disabled one of the key cogs to the global economy, the world’s biggest container shipping company. Does that count as an attack on the US, or at least its critical infrastructure?

Update: I’ve confirmed that “shipping lines” are included in Maritime Transportation. So Maersk would seem to count as critical infrastructure.

 

What Would a Digital Sanctions Regime Relying on Malware Look Like?

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A day ago, the second ransomware based on NSA tools leaked by Shadow Brokers hit. The attack was focused on Ukraine, in large part because “patient zero” appears to be a tax software update for a Ukrainian company M.E.Doc. But global giants include Maersk and Merck were also affected. Russian oil giant Rosneft was affected too, though there are conflicting claims about how badly it was disabled.

A day in, folks still can’t get a grasp on this attack, even down to the name (it started as Petya until security folks determined it’s not the ransomware of the same name, leading to the use of NotPetya).

While using far more attack vectors (and more toys from Shadow Brokers), this attack bears two similarities with last month’s WannaCry attack: the ransom requested $300 to decrypt locked data, and the ransom function was never really designed to work properly.

There is mounting evidence that the #GoldenEye / #Petya ransomware campaign might not have targeted financial gains but rather data destruction.

  • The choice of a regular, non-bulletproof e-mail service provider to act as a communication channel was obviously a wrong decision in terms of business.
  • The lack of automation in the payment & key retrieval process makes it really difficult for the attacking party to honor their end of the promise.
  • There is a total lack of usability in the payment confirmation: the user has to manually type an extremely long, mixed case “personal installation key” + “wallet” is prone to typos.

Update 6/28 06.00 GMT+3

The email address that was used by the threat actors to get payment confirmations has been suspended by Posteo. This means that all payments made overnight will be unable to get validated, and therefore will surely not receive the decryption key. Not that we have ever advised otherwise, but if you’re planning to pay the ransom, stop now. You’ll lose your data anyway, but you’ll contribute in funding the development of new malware. Even so, there have been 15 payments made after the suspension of the e-mail address. The wallet now totals 3.64053686 BTC out of 40 payments, with a net worth of $US 9,000.

Indeed, Matt Suiche argues the attack is better thought of as a wiper attack, designed to destroy rather than lock data, than a ransomware attack.

It will take some time to understand what the attack really is, particularly given the degree to which it appears to masquerade as things it’s not. But for the moment, I want to consider how a similar attack might be used as a counter to sanctions regimes. As far as we currently know, this attack made doing business with Ukraine a very expensive business proposition, as doing business with, say, some oligarchs in Russia is made costly for those subject to US sanctions because have to bank in the US. The attack served as a self-executing investigative method to identify just who had business tax dealing in Ukraine, and imposed an immediate cost. So whether or not that’s what this is, such an attack could be used to counteract sanctions imposed by the international banking community.

Again, I’m just spitballing.

But some dates are of interest.

On June 14, the Senate passed some harsh new sanctions on Russia, ostensibly just for Russia’s Ukrainian and Syrian related actions, not for its tampering in last year’s US election. The House mucked up that bill, but the Senate will continue to try to impose new sanctions. Trump might well veto the sanctions, but that will cause him a great deal of political trouble amid the Russian investigation.

The Petya/NotPetya malware was compiled on June 18.

Microsoft dates the attack to June 27 at 10:30 GMT.

We observed telemetry showing the MEDoc software updater process (EzVit.exe) executing a malicious command-line matching this exact attack pattern on Tuesday, June 27 around 10:30 a.m. GMT.

Today, June 28, is a public holiday in Ukraine, making it more difficult to deal with the attack.

Again, I’m not saying that’s what NotPetya is. I am saying that if you wanted to design a counter to financial sanctions using malware, NotPetya is close to what it’d look like.