The
real 'fake news'
It took a few days to get there,
but the Washington Post has finally made the circuitous voyage from a
headline declaring “Russian operation hacked a Vermont utility,
showing risk to U.S. electrical security, officials say” to
finally arriving at “Russian government hackers do not appear to
have targeted Vermont utility, say people close to investigation.”
One big thing you’ll notice
about the second headline is that it’s not really a story in and of
itself. Russia not hacking the US electric grid would not, on its
own, be even a low level story in a newspaper, because every single
day of history Russia has managed to not hack Vermont and not bring
down the nation’s electrical grid.
Indeed, the only reason the second
story exists at all is because the Washington Post released the first
wildly irresponsible and obviously false story claiming Russia did
something, and eventually decided that adding an “Editor’s Note”
pointing out effectively that the story was false was simply
insufficient.
What actually happened? On Friday,
as AntiWar.com noted, Burlington Electric found a piece of malware on
a single laptop not connected to any of their systems, and the
malware matched the long litany of “related” malware that a
recent government warning claimed was linked to the Russian military.
The government warning itself
conceded that they usually don’t blame somebody for entire families
of malware, but that it had become government policy to blame Russia
this time, because of the “election hack” scandal.
Hysteria about Russian hackers
hiding behind every consulate chef and the eagerness to make a story
where one realistically didn’t exist transformed a single laptop
getting a piece of malware, doubtless a daily occurrence at any major
utility, to a scare piece about Russia working to bring the entire
grid down around us.
Sure, it wasn’t true, but as the
Washington Post headlines make clear, it makes for a more interesting
sounding story than “Russia didn’t hack US power grid” would.
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