Apparently, AT&T suffered a cellular outage on Thursday that affected more than 74,000 customers. Other network providers were also affected, but not to the same degree. Immediately, my conspiracy brain went into overdrive. If X and Reddit are any indication, I am not the only one—much of the tinfoil hat crew is in agreement: There's something afoot, and the actors want us distracted or misdirected.
It's a real thing.
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incybersecurity
Those of us who've been paying attention for a long time now are not surprised by the #CyberAttack
— DoctorChezza (@DoctorChezza) February 22, 2024
We have been warned for some time now about this.
? is - what will come of this?
It's a distraction against some important news is my guess.
These were my initial questions after my colleague Nick Arama reported on the outage, which, as of this writing, there have been no updates on the origin or causation. What are we being distracted from? What is being covered up? Think of it like hiding a needle in a haystack. If you want to perform shenanigans on a country, entity, or a single person, you create an atmosphere where it appears that everyone is affected. You also make the event large enough to cause a requisite degree of confusion and chaos so that when the smoke clears, it takes a while to dig deeper.
Think of what we've experienced over the past week: A sitting U.S. president was deemed unfit to stand trial because he is in serious cognitive decline, our country's judicial system continues to make a mockery of jurisprudence, and we are discovering more and more the horrible harms caused by the COVID vaccines. The powers that be either want to obscure something being uncovered or distract us from what is yet to be revealed.
AT&T’s network went down for many of its customers across the United States Thursday morning, leaving customers unable to place calls, text or access the internet.
Although Verizon and T-Mobile customers reported some network outages, too, they appeared far less widespread. T-Mobile and Verizon said their networks were unaffected by AT&T’s service outage and customers reporting outages may have been unable to reach customers who use AT&T.
More than 74,000 AT&T customers reported outages on digital-service tracking site DownDetector. That’s not a comprehensive number: It tracks only self-reported outages. Reports had been rising steadily throughout the morning but leveled off in the 9 am ET hour.
AT&T acknowledged that it has a widespread outage but did not provide a reason for the system failure.
BCS, an international membership community of technology and cybersecurity professionals, follows and aggregates these types of attacks, and analyses the patterns and potentiality of what might come. Here is their summary of the biggest cyber attacks of 2023:
Some of 2023’s largest cyber attacks included:
- The Guardian Attack: a late 2022 attack that likely began with a phishing email and eventually saw many internal systems, including tills in the staff canteen, compromised. Despite the attack, readers of the print paper enjoyed their news on time
- Toronto SickKids: in late 2022, the Toronto Hospital for Sick Children fell victim to a ransomware attack. Uniquely, the malware’s maker — the LockBit Group — apologised and released the hospital’s files. Altruism isn’t the likely motivation. Rather, such attacks draw the ire of three letter agencies — something the group wanted to avoid
- FAA incident: aircraft across the US were grounded following an ‘incident’ involving the Federal Aviation Administration's computers. Over 11,000 flights were delayed and President Biden ordered a full investigation. Rather than a cyber attack, officials blamed a system error
- Royal Mail Ransomware attack: the mail carrier’s postal delivery arm was crippled by a LockBit ransomware attack in early 2023. Recovery took over a month
- MOVEit: MOVEit is a file transfer platform designed to help move sensitive data around securely. It fell victim to a sophisticated SQL injection that enabled attackers to make off with a trove of sensitive information
- Caesars Entertainment: huge amounts of money flows through Las Vegas and, as such, it was a natural place for cybercriminals to focus. In late 2023, a ransomware group compromised and attempted to extort Ceasars Entertainment
- The UK Electoral Commission: in late 2023, the Commission acknowledged that details about 40 million people had been exposed
In broad terms, these attacks show behaviour patterns on the part of attackers.
The types of attacks they analyzed give a window into what types of attacks we might expect in 2024. Ransomware attacks increased significantly in 2023, along with attacks on the supply chain, Zero-Day exploits and Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) are very popular with nation-state hacking groups, i.e., global domination/end days types. Then there is the dreaded "Cloud," which every IT professional I have ever encountered says to avoid if you can. Finally, AI continues to be a huge question mark. No one really knows how much of a wrench in the works AI will become, but everyone is afraid of the multitude of ways our government and other actors can use it to wreak havoc and create confusion on a massive scale.
Whatever gets uncovered as the reason behind this particular cellular outage, questions will linger and the tinfoil crew will continue to speculate. Is this corporate incompetence, government malfeasance, or an adversarial enemy? Worse yet, is it merely an intelligence-fueled, mass psyop to keep us doing head fakes and feeling anxious, while they perform the real damage?
