Pipeline Attack

[Phoebe]

Maybe I'm just super grim on a Monday morning, but I find the pipeline attack situation extremely upsetting. For many years now I have been friendly with some people who are experts in this zone of expertise - i.e. defending against cyberattack. The things they said were anxiety inspiring to be sure, but it's easier to suppress that type of anxiety when you don't see the direct manifestations of it in reality.
When you do see that major pieces of infrastructure are just as vulnerable to cyber attack as was suggested, and you realize people are fighting a war against this all the time which is not helped by our more or less (relative to others) open and free development of different systems all requiring expert defense, it is not nice to see more examples of that war being lost.
At least one place doing vital research at the forefront of the US response to Covid also was subject to cyber attack in recent months; It was in the news but there's a lot more going on behind the scenes there than was in the news.
Our enemies are using our vulnerabilities against us in this area and it's concerning that if they decided to make a severe and conjoined enough attack, we could have major problems.
I always think this won't happen because if you were an enemy of the US, wouldn't you prefer that it go on existing as a mediocre but still helpful economy? But not all the enemies are rational in that manner or benefit from the flourishing world economy in that manner.
There's a limit to how much I want to find things like this personally stressful but... It must be a Monday morning thing.

[bralbovsky]

Last year, a number of regional hospitals around the country experienced serious problems from network violations. Other systems have clearly been the targets of similar testing.

Not to add to stress, but it does seem like troops are gathering at the border.

The troops are from places that believe the world would be better off without us, that since they cannot conceive of ever reaching our level of comfort and complacency (because their oligarchs have slurped up all the meaningful resources), their lives would be unaffected by our disappearance. One advantage is that they wouldn't have to deal with our arrogance anymore...