Posted on 05/08/2021 10:33:09 AM PDT by Beave Meister
WASHINGTON (AP) — A U.S. energy company says a cyberattack forced it to temporarily halt all operations on a major pipeline that delivers roughly 45% of all fuel consumed on the East Coast.
Colonial Pipeline said the attack took place Friday and also affected some of its information technology systems. The company transports gasoline, diesel, jet fuel and home heating oil from refineries primarily located on the Gulf Coast through pipelines running from Texas to New Jersey.
The Alpharetta, Georgia-based company said it hired an outside cybersecurity firm to investigate the nature and scope of the attack and has also contacted law enforcement and federal agencies.
“Colonial Pipeline is taking steps to understand and resolve this issue,” the company said in a late Friday statement. “At this time, our primary focus is the safe and efficient restoration of our service and our efforts to return to normal operation. This process is already underway, and we are working diligently to address this matter and to minimize disruption to our customers and those who rely on Colonial Pipeline.”
Oil analyst Andy Lipow said the impact of the attack on fuel supplies and prices depends on how long the pipeline is down. An outage of one or two days would be minimal, he said, but an outage of five or six days could causes shortages and price hikes, particularly in an area stretching from central Alabama to the Washington, D.C., area.
Lipow said a key concern about a lengthy delay would be the supply of jet fuel needed to keep major airports operating, like those in Atlanta and Charlotte, North Carolina.
(Excerpt) Read more at citizenfreepress.com ...
Gas price hike coming in 3, 2, 1....
China flexing its muscles. List of demands to Resident Biden to follow shortly.
Indeed, It’s time for a piece of that Chinese rocket in orbit to fall on Wuhan.
Most concerning is that this is the beginning of a series of attacks to further destabilize the US to the point of seriously debilitating our ability to militarily respond to threats.....
Don’t look at this as an individual onetime threat, look at this as the possible beginning of a series of infrastructure attacks...
Imposter Biden. The Fraud in Chief.
Just topped off and filled up the lawnmower can.
Ransomware. After ferreting out who compromised them, IT and security chiefs could be next out the door.
They say a certain large age group and younger have neever lived through a gas shortage and inflation. They will soon get up close and personal knowledge.
Your gas will last a while, then more price gouging, then more price rises, then each month you can say "the good old days of May 7, 2021" and "the good old days of June 20, 2021".
A nightmare for fixed income seniors and everyone else.
Why is critical infrastructure connected to the internet?
It should be disconnected as much as physically and virtually possible.
It should be behind the strictest firewalls.
This kind of stuff should be made literally impossible to attack.
Right.
First company suspects should be the Richard Pryor luxury car driver types as in the Superman movie. Sudden wealth.
I personally wouldn't mind a mushroom cloud over Beijing.
Just topped of my tank 2.99/ gal. Up 10 cents since yesterday.
Nice, they can learn to ‘conserve’ up there, since they voted for the guy who will be cutting our gasoline consumption by roughly that same 45%. Hope they enjoy ‘saving the planet’.
For the life of me I will never understand why we don’t go after and prosecute hackers as terrorists, to the fullest extent of the national and international law, they have gotten away with this for far too long. On the other hand I also don’t understand why we continue to rely on other countries for our food and goods and services such as Third World countries to provide literally most of our food directly- or- for crying out loud, if it’s grown or raised here, like a-holes we ship it to China to be processed and shipped back to us - and pay them for it!! 🤪 Or why we continue to rely on third world countries like Mexico for food and OTC drugs, or third world country like India for OTC and Rx drugs, or on enemy like China for our medication’s and PPE equipment, why would we accept and request anything from them?? Outsourcing to other countries has destroyed USA AND we are completely vulnerable in every way because of the extent of it!!!
Or whoever was visiting sites they shouldn’t have on company computers.
Or someone was phished. There are some sophisticated phishers out there who will go through some trouble to trap the inattentive into revealing propriatery information about a target company.
People expect small organizations to slip up. But organizations that control critical information, traffic, and resources...brrr!
I suppose it’s bad enough that we already know Congress is already riddled with spies from China, Pakistan, and everywhere else!
Absolutely!
But Rona is encouraging people to work from home through VPN...
No excuse, in my opinion, but, as a co-worker put it, “people are suffering from rona-brain.”
All it takes is one idiot clicking a link, opening up something, and the whole system can be infected. These worms are pretty sophisticated.
Training doesn’t work. Idiots are idiots. You can’t fix stupid. Only solution is air gapped systems. But they piss people off.
Ransomware. After ferreting out who compromised them, IT and security chiefs could be next out the door.
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When that sort of attack succeeds, it does point to an incredible lapse in security because the attack pretty much requires admin access to the data servers.
Conversely, the remedy fo the attack, short of paying the extortion money, is to restore everything from backups, which hopefully was snapshot *before* the ransomware attack and and stored offline.
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