Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Climate activists in New York and other East Coast cities may have an opportunity to live their dream of life without fossil fuel, as operators of the Colonial pipeline struggle to fix damage from a cyber attack which shut down the pipeline on May 7th.
US declares emergency after ransomware shuts oil pipeline that pumps 100 million gallons a day
Oil transport by road allowed after Colonial Pipeline goes down, operator says recovery is under way but offers no recovery date
Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor
Mon 10 May 2021 // 00:15 UTCOne of the USA’s largest oil pipelines has been shut by ransomware, leading the nation’s Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration to issue a regional emergency declaration permitting the transport of fuel by road.
The Colonial Pipeline says it carries 100 million gallons a day of refined fuels between Houston, Texas, and New York Harbor, or 45 percent of all fuel needed on the USA’s East Coast. The pipeline carries fuel for cars and trucks, jet fuel, and heating oil.
It’s been offline since May 7th, according to a company statement, due to what the outfit described as “… a cybersecurity attack [that] involves ransomware.”
It added: “In response, we proactively took certain systems offline to contain the threat, which has temporarily halted all pipeline operations, and affected some of our IT systems.”
…
Read more: https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/10/colonial_pipeline_ransomware/
As a software expert, my first thought is someone who allows the connection of mission critical control systems to the internet should probably consider a different career. But perhaps I am being unfair. Even the most carefully isolated systems can be undone, if a careless employee or contractor connects their infected laptop to an internal network.
Update (EW): According to the BBC, the authors of the Colonial pipeline ransomware attack have denied their motivation was terrorism, though the BBC claims the software is set up to avoid infecting systems where the language setting is Russian.
“Our goal is to make money and not creating problems for society. … We do not participate in geopolitics, do not need to tie us with a defined government and look for… our motives … From today, we introduce moderation and check each company that our partners want to encrypt to avoid social consequences in the future.”.
Can’t help thinking whatever their professed motivation, they are going to receive a personal visit from some scary people in the near future. The apparent Russian connection is embarrassing for President Putin, and they hurt the USA.
Do not try to view the Darkside website to see the statement from the criminals first hand – boobytrapping web pages is an old hacker trick.
Send off the White House thank you note to Putin.
In October 2016 there was a fire and explosion in this same Colonial pipeline at Helena, AL. The NTSB accident report is here. They found against the construction company performing scheduled work. The report was issued in 2019.
That explosion followed an earlier leak in September which shut down the pipeline for a couple of weeks. According to AAA, that caused gas price spikes of $0.17/gal in Tennessee and $0.28/gal in Georgia. Presumably more further up the East Coast. I remember that; we just drove a bit less. That shutdown was during the winter heating season plus people were driving quite a bit more on a daily basis than they are now.
I haven’t seen anything that suggests this shutdown will last longer than the 2016 event, so I don’t expect it will have any greater price effect. Just more press coverage because cyber attacks are sexier than backhoe mishaps.
My normal driving is around 12,000-15,000 miles per year; in 2020 I didn’t even make it to 4,000, so a gas price spike of $0.28/gal wouldn’t be noticed.
The difference this time is the publicity. Very long lines at gas stations where I am, just north of Atlanta, and some stations running out. Independent dealers have jacked-up their prices.
I’ve always used the skills learned in Boy Scouts, i.e., be prepared. I filled my cars up over the weekend when I heard of the problem. Today, I went shopping – food, medicines, pet supplies, toilet paper (of course). If the pipeline is down another couple of days, someone is going to start speculating about a diesel shortage disrupting the delivery of goods. Doesn’t matter at that point if it happens or not. The speculation, itself, will spook people to empty the stores. Don’t need to be a rocket scientist to figure out how to avoid problems.
If it happens, I’m good. If it doesn’t, I don’t need to do any shopping for a few weeks.
If you live in an affected area you might want to consider this possibility.
This is OT but I thought it worth mentioning.
My job is to be on call to take the loads that don’t get covered by other drivers or when drivers call off, or when the load planners or dispatch screws up, or when other drivers screw up or get sick on the road requiring a relay or trailer or truck recovery.
I get paid a salary to do this and am on call from 06:00 Sunday to 06:00 Friday and often work and get paid for extra time on Fridays and Saturdays.
This week I have not gone out. I was called to go out at 18:00 yesterday but then they canceled that call. This is very unusual.
Over 80% of our the companies business is for the auto industry. I am beginning to wonder if we are seeing the beginning of the effects of the microchip shortage.
The suggestion of Russian involvement appears to come from Dmitri Alperovitch, the chairman of Silverado Policy Accelerator and former chief technology officer of the cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike Holdings Inc, according to a Bloomberg article by Alzya Sebenius and Ryan Gallagher originally linked to by PaulH above.
Demitri Alperovitch and Crowdstrike have been discussed in a number of Climate Audit posts by Steve McIntryre, and not in a complimentary way. See here, here, and here. And there are others as well; this one by Scott Ritter looks especially juicy. Alperovitch’s MO seems to be to grab headlines by claiming Russian Involvement in every cybersecurity event. These claims are widely reported by the press, who have done nothing credible to check the assertions, assuming they even have the in-house skills to do so.
By the time someone with McIntyre’s ability and persistence digs into the actual facts, it’s old news.
Mr. Watt: thank you for that reminder, I read those back then and realized what a truly bright guy McIntyre is. The moment this latest was attributed to “the Russians”, BS meter hit 11. And it’s only supposed to go to 10. I don’t know who did this, but I do know the press source doesn’t know, either.
And the jerk Governor of one state is pushing to shut off a pipe;l ine supplying a key refinery in Ontario.
This is no different then Uncle Joe cutting off oil drilling – heck, Uncle Joe should be cheering the hackers for “saving the planet.”
“Even the most carefully isolated systems can be undone, if a careless employee or contractor connects their infected laptop to an internal network.”
If this is reality, forget about asteroids, CMEs, pandemics or even climate change -we’re doomed. If this is reality, then Parkinson was on the money saying our society promotes people to their level of incompetence.
If a private band of hackers can shut down the largest fuel pipeline in the USA, then what could hackers backed by the governments of China, Russia, Iran, or North Korea do?
But let’s not fail to at least consider an alternate reality – that this is just another step in the engineering of the new world order.
When Elon Musk had his ransomware attack some time back, it got me thinking about the problem of receiving funds untraceably, and concluded that if that were really possible, it would constitute a golden opportunity to cheat the tax man and the shareholders.
It’s claimed that if you’re smart enough, technically savvy enough, and careful enough, you can transfer and receive cybermoney without being identified. And if that’s the case, we hoi polloi can never hope to know the truth of who did what or why to the Colonial Pipeline. We can only hope it really was just a gang of Russian hackers acting on their own, a bit like the guys with the box cutters.
“If a private band of hackers can shut down the largest fuel pipeline in the USA, then what could hackers backed by the governments of China, Russia, Iran, or North Korea do?”
I’m truly amazed something like this or bigger hasn’t already happened. I recall some years ago a report that taking down only 16 (iirc) electrical substations across the country simultaneously would collapse the entire grid. Given how easily accessed they are, I would have expected it to be done already.
“As a software expert, my first thought is someone who allows the connection of mission critical control systems to the internet should probably consider a different career. But perhaps I am being unfair.”
I don’t think you are being unfair at all. The ignorance of science by the general public doesn’t come close to their ignorance of technology. And, I include in that ignorant set, many of the IT programmers themselves; who would have ever thought a programmer couldn’t program a text box to accept the multiple ways a date can be entered?
Think about it, then realize our entire society is at risk by these corporatists, government officials, and the rest of the technologically ignorant.