Morgan Wright, the Chief Security Advisor at SentinelOne and former Senior Advisor of the U.S. State Department and the Anti-Terrorism Assistance Program, appeared on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow on Wednesday to discuss the recent rise in ransomware attacks. According to Wright, “if you remove the ability to monetize this, these gangs are out of business because they’re only in it for one reason — to make money.”
Morgan Wright, the Chief Security Advisor at SentinelOne and former Senior Advisor of the U.S. State Department and the Anti-Terrorism Assistance Program, appeared on Breitbart News Daily today to speak with Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief and host of Breitbart News Daily, Alex Marlow. The key topic of the day was the rise in ransomware attacks and the recent cyber attack on the Colonial Pipeline.
Asking Wright what we currently know about the colonial pipeline hack and what the establishment media may have missed about the situation, Wright stated: “Details are always hard to come by in these things, because it’s the fog of war basically as the investigation unrolls. We do know what publicly has been said but there are some things that we can figure out behind that as well. One is that definitely if they’re not in Russia, they’re definitely linked to Russia, these attackers, because they’re getting air cover from Vladamir Putin.”
Wright continued: “We have criminal gangs operating in countries or regions we have no extradition treaty with, no mutual legal assistance treaties, so we get zero help in investigating these things. The second thing is, this is actually kind of a watershed moment. This is one of the first things where a criminal organization has taken the place of a nation-state in terms of an attack on infrastructure.”
Wight discussed why this latest cyberattack is so unique, stating: “We now have criminal organizations that can actually have the same effect as a nation-state would against our critical infrastructure, and power, energy, water, you want to bring a nation to its knees, Alex, you go after those three things.”
Discussing the motivations of the hackers, Wright said: “I think one of the underreported things about this, and I think it’s a day of reckoning, is the use of cryptocurrency to enable these groups to continue their activities. In other words, if you remove the ability to monetize this, these gangs are out of business because they’re only in it for one reason — to make money. So I think there’ll be a day of reckoning with how countries look at the use of cryptocurrencies, especially Bitcoin.”
Listen to the full episode at Breitbart News Daily here.