Cyberattacks & Rocket-fire
OPEC+ Restraint Falters
“Our goal is to make money, and not creating problems for society,” DarkSide [group that attacked Colonial, from the FT]
Editor’s Note: Matt is working w/ the Marshall Society on their digital speaker series.
Tomorrow, the Marshall Society is hosting a panel on the virus / recovery efforts.
Panelists:
James Sweeney - Chief Economist / Americas CIO at Credit Suisse
Dr. Claudia Sahm - Former Section Chief at the Federal Reserve
Jeanna Smialek - Federal Reserve Reporter for the NYT
Y’all are welcome to join (panelists will be taking questions live) - the event kicks off at 6pm London time (1pm NYC / noon Texas) tomorrow.
Event link / details -
COLONIAL CYBERATTACK.
On Friday, the Colonial Pipeline suffered a ransomware attack. The hacker-group DarkSide is allegedly behind the attack.
Colonial is responsible for delivering 40%+ of the American Southeast’s gasoline supply. Obviously, an outage of this sort can affect gasoline prices.
This event further raises cybersecurity concerns about American infrastructure.
But - putting that aside - the public response from the hackers stole the story…
…it read like a passage from absurdist fiction:
“We are apolitical, we do not participate in geopolitics, do not need to tie us with a defined government and look for other our motives.
“Our goal is to make money, and not creating problems for society.
“From today we introduce moderation and check each company that our partners want to encrypt to avoid social consequences in the future” - DarkSide
Joe Weisenthal (Bloomberg) had a few good takes on the ordeal.
The FT noted:
“In a sign of how ransomware has become a professionalised industry, DarkSide operates its own “press office” and claims to have an ethical approach to choosing its targets” - FT
What’s clear - from this attack (and, well, all recent major hacks) - is that hacking risk is a tail risk that the market (industry) is not appropriately valuing -
OLD WORLD ATTACKS.
Rocket-fire has followed a conflict at Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque.
Israeli police & Muslim protesters clashed over planned home evictions & restrictions at the mosque.
Hundreds of Palestinians were wounded - Hamas responded by firing ~200 rockets.
Israel then responded to Hamas:
“The Israel Defense Force’s spokesman Jonathan Conricus said the military had a ‘green light’ to hit military targets until Hamas ‘gets the message and learns its lesson’” - the FT
Politics aside, history would tell us that Hamas has not quickly gotten “the message”.
We expect to see that Israel will continue to respond with (more) air-strikes.
And - as of today - we don’t expect these events to escalate into a larger conflict -
OTHER NEWS.
OPEC+ restraint appears to to be faltering…
Iron ore prices hit records on Monday
The biggest jobs (data) miss on record
Check out pg2 of JPM’s annual energy report
That’s it for this week - check out the panel tomorrow - catch y’all next Tuesday -