TODD: You of course have read about and heard about the ransomware attack on really a backbone portion of the U.S. energy system. This pipeline in Texas. A gang called DarkSide is said to have accomplished this. There is a gentleman who has done more serving in the armed forces than I ever have, well, which is none. His name is Russel L. Honore. He was U.S. Army, retired 2008 and was Katrina leadership. Public speaker. Books on survival, leadership and “Don’t Get Stuck on Stupid!”. I’m looking at his tweet here, he had suspected that this hack, this cyberattack on one of our largest pipelines was perhaps the work of what he calls the domestic terrorism that attacked our Capitol.
It’s quite possible this domestic terror group cyberattacked our infrastructure. The FBI needs help. I had thought that buffalo horn man had not — I didn’t know, is he a hacker too? See, this is sort of the Trump Derangement Syndrome. To reach for that, because it affords you the opportunity. I mean, you may well think that. I just find that baffling that one would think that, given that cyberattacks like this are now — they’ve happened to school districts and city governments. And to turn to the FBI in this, I’m sorry. Is it a requirement now that we forget that the Old Executive Office Building got hacked? And we think it was by China and they stole a bunch of personal identifiable information on our veterans and people in the military? I just need to check and see. Are we supposed to pretend that didn’t occur, or that the government is particularly skilled at this or better at it than say private industry?
It is a frightening thing that people can do this, and we’ve seen people get into our dams, and fortunately they didn’t, in fact, you know, flood a neighborhood or flood an area. This is a focus. It should be, for us. Because it could be catastrophic. But to turn and say, “Well, it’s probably the January 6th rioters who did this.” No. No, it’s probably not. It’s almost certainly not. The AP thinks it’s this hacker group. Of course it is likely to be that. But look, there is in this clip you’re about to hear, to me this is just an absolute classic. It’s almost post-doctorate work from the ever-continuing education we all get from the Limbaugh Institute. Rush explains here why he defended Apple’s refusal to give the FBI backdoor access to an iPhone.
RUSH: This ransomware stuff. It’s a new kind of computer hacking, and it is becoming more widely proliferated out there. And essentially the way it works is, you can trigger it with a phishing email. You can fall victim to a phishing attack. It generally can’t happen unless you help it to happen. It’s not as though your computer is invaded without you knowing it. You get an email or something — a message that looks legitimate from someplace. And you click on a link because it’s requiring you to, suggesting you do.
When you click on that link, you’re sent to a website that then infects the computer. In this case with this ransomware virus, which has a couple of different names. This WannaCry, WannaCrypt ransomware. It’s all over the world now. And once you click on the link, what happens is that the hacker encrypts all of the data on your computer and sends you an email. Actually you end up on a website — that tells you you have been hacked. That your data has been encrypted and you have to pay a certain amount of money in a certain amount of time in order to be sent the decryption key, the password. And if you don’t, then your data will be lost and destroyed forever.
When that originally happened, the ransomware was attacking companies and institutions, and the ransom was very expensive. And immediately computer people began working on how to defeat the encryption without paying the ransom. And what the ransomware makers decided to do then was to really lower the cost of the ransom to make it the easiest option that somebody who had been hacked would face. If they charge you $150 or 200 or $500, that’s theoretically much less of a hassle. And it’s much speedier than to try to go out and get rid of the virus that’s in your computer with a hack and try to find a way, find the key to decrypt it.
And so, that’s the latest manifestation. The ransomware is not usually that expensive. In this case it is so widespread, that it affected hospitals all over the world. It’s an indication if they do something like this it could affect the power grid. Imagine being able to take us back to the seventeenth or eighteenth century with no electricity. So people take this stuff very seriously, as they should. The Pentagon, the CIA, they’re constantly under assault from any number of people. Pajama-clad little kids in their basements are trying to hack in. Everybody in the world is. And that’s why computer network security is such an improved thing, a great thing. And why there’s so much attention paid to it, because the exploits and the attacks are getting more and more sophisticated.
TODD: The deceit where Rush is taking us in regard to distributing this stuff to the government. The government… this is, I guess, another example of where we need to get better at productizing freedom or at communicating, at least. The government is not the thing that can swoop in and save everything. This is a great opportunity for Republicans to be out in front of the fact that Biden is putting government on top of everything. They are gonna make sure that you can’t kick a renter out of your house if they don’t pay rent. Is Fauci gonna extend that? Somehow he got the right to do that. That’s been invented for him, or was. Putting the government in charge of giving money to black farmers but not white farmers. Putting the government in charge of every aspect of life.
We had this opportunity to go back and say, “Wait a minute. How many hack jobs have occurred in government versus private industry?” It’s always phenomenal to me, when I watch or, during show prep, am exposed to the news saying, “Government sources say they’re available to help the” — okay, great. It’s helping. Who helps the government? Why is there this delineation? Why do we allow this in our society? We talk about the government. Well, what’s the government? It’s people working there for paychecks. We have people in private industry who work there for paychecks. How is it that private industry can’t come in — oh, wait. They are. Oh, no, they are. I forget myself. Oh, I apologize. No, no, private industry is stepping in to help government with the covid passports.
It’s funny how the technology we can’t seem to handle is making sure that we secure our energy grids. But, man almighty, when it comes to the thing Rush warned us about. With the left using this to control us ever more, to segregate society, as they’re doing in Washington state, THEN we get the help of private industry. You see that? All of a sudden now, well, it’s just private industry. They’re helping the government. Facebook is helping the government do away with disinformation. But I thought it was the government that came and helped us when we got hacked?