The Colonial Pipeline hack might be the most serious attack on our economy since the Biden Administration took over. Gas stations are running out of fuel. The hack will likely propel the gas prices already rising rapidly.
On this, the fifth day of a significant shutdown of the Colonial Pipeline’s eastern delivery network, we need to know how this happened and how it can be prevented from happening to another part of our infrastructure.
The Colonial Pipeline, which delivers about 45% of the fuel used along the Eastern Seaboard, shut down Friday after a ransomware attack by gang of criminal hackers that calls itself DarkSide. Depending on how long the shutdown lasts, the incident could impact millions of consumers, NBC News reports.
Biden did say Russian government had nothing to do with it, after the media ran wild claiming it was definitely the Russian government agents or Putin. They see Russians in their coffee when they get up in the morning. There is evidence the Darkside gang is in Russia, however.
NBC News added, Colonial Pipeline, the operator of the country’s largest fuel pipeline, halted all operations over the weekend, forcing what the company called a precautionary shutdown. U.S. officials said Monday that the “ransomware” malware used in the attack didn’t spread to the critical systems that control the pipeline’s operation. But the mere fact that it could have done so alarmed outside security experts.
Colonial believes they can restore service by Friday.
All we really know about how it happened and why is speculation. We know it was a ransomware attack.
Ransomware scrambles data that can only be decoded with a software key after the victim pays off the criminal perpetrators. An epidemic of ransomware attacks has gotten so bad that Biden administration officials recently deemed them a national security threat.
No one knows if Colonial paid the ransom to get the encryption key.
Pipelines aren’t at more of a risk than any other organization but they are critical infrastructure.
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