Supply Chain Realities: The Trains are Too Long!

Railway Age ^ | April 25, 2022 | Matthew DeLay

[Philo1962]

Why is it that these big complex, pushing, pulling braking, steering systems are not fully computerized. So men don’t have to be manually calculate weight/velocity/windspeed & what not. From start to finish it should be completely computerized.

Perhaps you haven't heard. One of the biggest threats to America today is cybercrime. Anything computerized, if it's linked to the Internet, can be hacked. Two recent incidents come to mind.

Colonial Pipeline is a 6"-9" diameter gasoline pipeline from Texas to Virginia, with branch lines feeding Georgia and the Carolinas. The pumps and valves are computerized. A ransomware gang hacked it and installed malware to shut it down, then demanded millions in ransom to remove their own malware and turn it back on.

Colonial ended up paying the ransom. During the course of this, gas shortages (caused by the malware shutdown) drove the price to over $6.00/gallon in Virginia, for example. The rest of the country was paying about $3.00/gallon at the time.

Then there was the time the Iranian Revolutionary Guard hacked into the floodgates control computer at the Bowman Avenue Dam, northeast of NYC, briefly taking control of the floodgates. If they had opened them, the bridges into NYC from Connecticut would have been washed out, and billions of dollars in property damage would have been done. Who knows how many lives would have been lost?

If it had been combined with terrorist operations to blow up the bridges and tunnels from New Jersey and upstate New York, NYC and Long Island would have been completely cut off, causing food and fuel shortages for millions of people in just a few days.

It isn't clear why the Iranians didn't open those floodgates when they had the chance. Maybe they just hacked into the system to prove that they could.

And then, of course, there's the 2020 election. Election systems are supposed to be off the Internet, so they can't get hacked. Some were not.

Anything that's connected to the Internet can be hacked. We are already vulnerable to hacking of navigation systems for ships and aircraft. Imagine all the airliners in the air one morning get a signal commanding them to dive straight into the ground. And every ship that's moving gets a command to turn and ram whatever's next to it: canal embankments, other ships, or port facilities.

The obvious solution is to keep these systems isolated from the Internet, and spend some money on security software and people who know how to run it. But now various human vulnerabilities come into play. The decision makers don't realize the magnitude of the threat, and don't want to spend the money. The system operators can make mistakes, or just get lazy, or get bribed.