Nick Lawler
Appearances
To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy
Ep 7: Everything Everywhere All At Once
Yep. Nick Lawler, general manager of the Littleton Electric Light and Water Departments in Littleton, Massachusetts.
To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy
Ep 7: Everything Everywhere All At Once
Yeah, it was the Friday before Thanksgiving. I remember it being a beautiful day. It's funny how you can remember certain things from a certain day when something bad happens, right? I was out doing yard work, and the call actually came through to our assistant general manager at the time, and he sent the call to me. It was a call directly from FBI officers in Boston, Massachusetts.
To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy
Ep 7: Everything Everywhere All At Once
No, he wanted me to give him my personal email address. And he wanted to send me an email with the link to click to kind of figure out what was going on on our networks in Littleton. It reminded me a lot of the Microsoft spam calls that you get that you... your operating system's out of date and, you know, please send us an email and we'll get it up to date for you. That's what it seemed like.
To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy
Ep 7: Everything Everywhere All At Once
So I obviously didn't trust him. And he kept on saying he needed to get it on a personal email so that way the threat actors couldn't detect his presence.
To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy
Ep 7: Everything Everywhere All At Once
I really did not believe that it was real. Didn't believe him. I asked him to repeat his name. I then hung up the phone on him and then looked up our local FBI Boston office. Telephone number. I called that directly, asked for that gentleman, and he was there.
To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy
Ep 7: Everything Everywhere All At Once
And he answered the phone and carried on the conversation like I didn't hang up the phone on him, which I still didn't give him my email address and still didn't think it was real, still thought it was some sort of scam. We said, no, if this is a real event and it's as serious as you say it is, then we'll see you in person on Monday morning. He was there at 10 o'clock sharp.
To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy
Ep 7: Everything Everywhere All At Once
Then I got the call from the office, and two gentlemen are here to see you, one from Homeland Security and one from the FBI. And I'm like, oh, my God. Okay, this is real. Okay. From the X-Files? Yeah, the X-Files. The whole thing was like the movies. And even at that point, you still don't believe it. That's when they started talking about threat actors and really who they were.
To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy
Ep 7: Everything Everywhere All At Once
They slid a document in front of us, you know, and had right on it, you know, a nation state actor, Volt Typhoon. And that's the first I ever heard of Volt Typhoon.
To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy
Ep 7: Everything Everywhere All At Once
So they explained Volt Typhoon and I remember saying to him, so we're under attack from China? And he's like, who said China? And I'm looking at the pamphlet right on there. It says Volta, you know, Volta from the nation state threat actor from China. I'm like, well, I don't know. I mean, the paperwork says it. But they are very diplomatic and very careful what they said.
To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy
Ep 7: Everything Everywhere All At Once
They reiterated the 200 organizations that had been compromised. They kept saying that we're the top priority of the federal government, which they're blew me away, you know, because we're a small town. You never would think that we were the focal point of the Chinese government trying to wreck havoc on our critical infrastructure.
To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy
Ep 7: Everything Everywhere All At Once
Yeah. I'm an extremely direct individual, and I was very blunt with them in what I was saying. Even then, I still didn't believe it. It just seemed too fake to me. It seemed like a movie. I used to start thinking, are these guys the threat actors? Anybody can go buy a suit and print out some piece of paper and go show up at a utility.
To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy
Ep 7: Everything Everywhere All At Once
It came out saying, how can we be the top priority of the federal government? And we have pretty good contacts with the Department of Energy through our trade association, American Public Power Association. So I called down to our contacts and just said, you know, and there's a lot they can't tell me because I don't have security clearances. And I just said, hey, this just happened.
To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy
Ep 7: Everything Everywhere All At Once
Can you just tell me if Littleton is the top priority of the federal government? And they laughed at me a little bit. And then they said, well, what's going on? And I mentioned Vol Typhoon. And then it was just silence. Like, OK, oh, my God.
To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy
Ep 7: Everything Everywhere All At Once
Yeah, there's a range. There's still some utilities that think they're too small and never happened to them. There's some utilities that think they're very good and it won't happen to them. But we need to be prepared and we need to have processes in place to be able to handle it and mitigate it as quickly as we can.
To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy
Ep 7: Everything Everywhere All At Once
Chaos. I mean, Americans can't live without power for 24 hours before they start losing their mind. And we're very much involved in mutual aid. So we see firsthand after a hurricane hits how quickly you need to get the electricity restored to businesses and residents.
To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy
Ep 7: Everything Everywhere All At Once
From what we can tell, Voltaifun was gaining access to multiple networks to be able to create havoc in the United States at a point in time. And we can all guess what that point in time could be, and we'd probably all be wrong, but there was, you know, there's some thoughts related to Taiwan.
To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy
Ep 7: Everything Everywhere All At Once
We see it in the transportation sector, we see it in the water sector, we see it in the communication sector, we see it in the energy sector. And the worst day is an everything, everywhere, all at once scenario.