Richter Scale for Cyber-Wankers

Oh for fuck’s sake. Dragos has decided what the cybersecurity industry really needed was a “Richter Scale” for OT incidents, because apparently describing a breach as “catastrophic, plant-melting, career-ending shitshow” wasn’t scientific enough for the boardroom parasites. Now we can assign pretty numbers to the magnitude of your industrial disaster, likely while the safety systems are screaming and the centrifuges are auditioning for the next Fast & Furious movie.

The scale runs from 0 to 10, logarithmic, just like real earthquakes. So a 3.0 is “some script kiddy pinged your firewall,” while a 9.0 is “the entire Eastern Seaboard is now dark and the EPA is using your CEO as a piñata.” It’s designed to help executives understand impact without having to comprehend words like “Modbus” or “segmentation” or “why the fuck is our turbine controller on the internet, Gary?”

Here’s the punchline: While consultants are billing $500 an hour to debate whether that ransomware attack was a 6.5 or a 6.8, the control engineers are still sharing passwords on Post-it notes and the “air gap” turned out to be a wet string and someone’s Bluetooth speaker. You can measure the magnitude all you want, but it won’t stop the explosion when the HMI gets pwned because Karen from HR needed to charge her phone at the USB port in the electrical substation.

But sure, add another framework. That’ll patch the unpatched Windows 2000 boxes running your water treatment plant. Wankers.

https://www.darkreading.com/ics-ot-security/richter-scale-model-measures-cyber-incidents

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I once worked a gig at a geological survey office—perfect irony given this Richter scale bollocks. Real earthquake hit, 4.5 magnitude, knocked the mainframe offline. While the sysadmin was busy measuring the vibration dampeners and updating his “incident severity log,” I simply walked into the server room, kicked the UPS with my steel-capped boot, and the bastard came back online. Sometimes the most effective disaster recovery plan is righteous anger and a size-12 Doc Marten. The users didn’t care about the magnitude on the scale; they just cared that payroll was down. Metrics are for people who aren’t actually fixing things.

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