Last month the Colonial pipeline in the United States was shut down after being targeted by a ransomware attack from the Russian gang DarkSide. The pipeline, which supplies 45 percent of the gasoline consumed on the east coast, resumed operations after six days and only after Colonial paid the ransom fee of nearly five million dollars. The disruption resulted in fuel shortages and spiking gas prices across the eastern US.
What does this incident inform us about the vulnerabilities of our own infrastructure? How susceptible is Canada to these new and evolving digital threats?
MLI Senior Fellow Christian Leuprecht joins The Agenda with Steve Paikin, alongside Executive Director of the Canadian Cyber Threat Exchange Robert Gordon and University of Carleton Professor Stephanie Carvin, to discuss.
This is just the tip of the iceberg of the cyber threats we are facing, warns Leuprecht.
“Ransomware is an 18 billion dollar a year industry, and if you hit critical infrastructure they are even more likely to pay up…It reminds us of the vulnerability of our system overall. I think most people in North America thought this happened elsewhere in the world.
No corner of society can assume they are safe, adds Carvin:
“It is a serious incident that has served as a wake-up call to pretty much any critical infrastructure operator, whether they be government, private sector, or even most industries, which actually contain a lot of our private data. This really shows that this kind of attack can happen to anyone, anywhere, including here in Canada today.”
What can be done to combat this cyber piracy? We need consequences in the form of sanctions, Leuprecht explains, not just against the criminal non-state actors, but against countries who tolerate or host them as well.
