Fears of gas price surge after 'DarkSide'
cyber attack shuts Colonial Pipeline
between Texas and NJ that carries 45%
of East Coast fuel: Experts call it
'most significant assault on
infrastructure to date in the US'
Daily Mail (UK),
by
Andrew Court
&
Harriet Alexander
Original Article
Posted By: Ribicon,
5/9/2021 12:07:07 PM
The largest gasoline pipeline in the country was shut down on Friday after a sophisticated ransomware attack, which experts are calling the most dramatic cyberattack on U.S. soil to date. In a Saturday statement, Colonial Pipeline said that it 'proactively took certain systems offline to contain the threat, which has temporarily halted all pipeline operations, and affected some of our IT systems.' The hackers are likely a professional cybercriminal group, and a group dubbed 'DarkSide' was among the potential suspects, two U.S. government officials told Reuters.(Snip) DarkSide is known for deploying ransomware and extorting victims—while avoiding targets in post-Soviet states.
Reply 1 - Posted by:
Catherine 5/9/2021 12:14:55 PM (No. 779909)
This is trickle down destruction of our country. They've had four years to make their plans. Now they're swinging into action.
29 people like this.
Reply 2 - Posted by:
bighambone 5/9/2021 12:21:05 PM (No. 779915)
Ask the Biden-Harris Administration or the Congressional leftist and liberal Democrats and they will tell you that it must have been dangerous and violent “White Supremacists” who pulled off the dirty hacking deed with the objective of surging gasoline prices upward in the Northeastern blue states.
15 people like this.
Reply 3 - Posted by:
Roberto 5/9/2021 12:40:09 PM (No. 779926)
Why should this matter? Biden wants to shut down all fossil fuel pipelines, refineries, etc. The cyber-terrorists are merely speeding up his schedule.
23 people like this.
Reply 4 - Posted by:
RuckusTom 5/9/2021 12:40:17 PM (No. 779927)
Great. Right after Biden shutdown the Keystone pipeline and stopped additional fracking on federal lands. Guess how goods get to your local stores? If you said "trucks" you get Gold Star for the day. Now, bonus question: what do those trucks run on? If you said gasoline, very good. If the price of gasoline goes up what happens to the price of those goods being delivered to cover the increased price of the gasoline. The price of the goods goes up. See how that works? It's called i-n-f-l-a-t-i-o-n (or a form of it).
34 people like this.
Reply 5 - Posted by:
DVC 5/9/2021 12:45:21 PM (No. 779928)
Chinese, aided by morons in charge of the pipeline control systems. Commercial company computer security is usually a joke.
Years ago, I asked a friend of mine who was an engineer at a major central power plant if their control systems would be vulnerable to a net attack. He laughed and said that their security was run by dunces who understood just barely enough about computers to keep them doing their automatic adjustments to the boilers, fuel feeding and power output. And,yes, they were connected to the net.
His view was that perhaps the computers were so ancient that hackers would have difficulty connecting to them. That would be their only real security. This was about 15 years ago.
Putting your control systems on the net is convenient and it is cheap, but a dedicated, non-internet connected, encrypted hard line connection to the central pipeline office, or no connection at all to ANY remote computers from individual pumping and control stations would cost more and be inconvenient. So, they are on the net.
So, almost certainly they believed some fast drummer selling "the finest multilayered security software in the world" which the smooth talking salesman says "is absolutely invulnerable to ANY kind of hacking attack".
And guess what....IT ISN'T. Even if the direct attack is blocked, phishing schemes find out access information or install a virus, social connections get more information, and some moron employee takes a mem stick from his home computer and sticks it into his work computer, and......a virus is installed which opens up the system to hackers.
Count on this being what happened in some variation. Same old story, as predictable as night following day, and commercial companies are LAZY and stupid about computer security.
Decades ago, banks were running their whole operations by medium sized computers called VAXs. A friend was a VAX repair man. He told me that he regularly found, during service calls, that the bank's computer, controlling ALL their money still had the factory installed top level passwords on the system....obvious as hell for guessing and widely know. The "system" account factory password was " admin", and the "admin" account factory password was "system". And many banks left those passwords out of laziness and stupidity. They only got away with it because nobody even tried to hack them in those late 80s times.
12 people like this.
Reply 6 - Posted by:
Bur Oak 5/9/2021 12:59:07 PM (No. 779937)
This shutdown of the Colonial Pipeline is a failure of the Department of Homeland Security. They are supposed to be preventing this.
38 people like this.
Many years ago when I lived in Phx, the main supply of fuel coming from Tucson (out of Texas) blew up. Janet Napolitano was governor. I will suggest you guys on the East Coast fill your tanks and only drive if necessary. The line from TX was fine, but the tankers needed to get the goods to Phx took forever. Hadn't seen anything like it since Jimmah's waiting lines.
13 people like this.
Reply 8 - Posted by:
Periwinkel 5/9/2021 1:03:18 PM (No. 779941)
One of these days, someone in charge is going to get serious about cyber crime and destroying the tiny little men who perpetrate it because they are completely ineffective?/ineffectual? in the rest of their miserable little lives.
5 people like this.
Reply 9 - Posted by:
bad-hair 5/9/2021 1:08:41 PM (No. 779943)
Hi New Yawk, DC and the rest. Keep voting against fracking in Pennsylvania. Love, Texas.
22 people like this.
Reply 10 - Posted by:
Blue-Z-Anna 5/9/2021 1:12:50 PM (No. 779947)
Shutting down Keystone makes Biden a co-conspirator in this crime. But then.....doing damage to America is half the fun of being a Marxist enviro-luddite.
20 people like this.
Reply 11 - Posted by:
greyseal 5/9/2021 1:19:37 PM (No. 779958)
Just in time for the Memorial Day holiday when those who've been told to vax up and feel it might be safe to venture outside for some R&R will need to gas up the cars. By late summer, it'll be $5 gas, more inflation, and another nail in the "everyone must have an EV" coffin. As the auto bigs consider their options in light of a push by 2035 to eradicate the combustion engine, this is just another psyop from the shadowy forces backing SloJoe and the Ho. Conspiracy, you say? How many "coincidences" do you need...?
greyseal
13 people like this.
Reply 12 - Posted by:
Corndoggies 5/9/2021 1:25:30 PM (No. 779961)
They run on diesel fuel not gasoline. Diesel used to be a cheap fuel but some rat decided to lower the sulphur content and it needs extra refining now. I think that was BJ Clinton.
13 people like this.
Reply 13 - Posted by:
DVC 5/9/2021 1:33:36 PM (No. 779968)
#12, and don't forget the higher taxes, too.
7 people like this.
Reply 14 - Posted by:
mc squared 5/9/2021 1:43:46 PM (No. 779983)
People foraging for gas to escape the Democrat dystopia. But don't forget: No dancing in DC.
9 people like this.
Reply 15 - Posted by:
Philipsonh 5/9/2021 2:25:23 PM (No. 780027)
If the idiotic Governors running the Democratic NE States had allowed other pipelines to be built, this event would not be so impactful; But, why should they care, because THEY will not go without anything.
The LAST thing they care about are the folks in their States ( except for donations, of course ).
4 people like this.
Reply 16 - Posted by:
Noj15 5/9/2021 2:26:06 PM (No. 780029)
"Funny, this is exactly what the Green New Deal people wanted," said Obama to ValJar as he passed a joint to Kamala.
14 people like this.
Reply 17 - Posted by:
PIApilot 5/9/2021 3:13:52 PM (No. 780076)
Let them experience a lack of fuel. Then they'll start to understand what eliminating fossil fuels will mean to their daily lives. During the elections I was discussing this with a friend and mentioned that if you want to see Progressives change their tunes shut down pipelines going to the East Coast for a week. Can wait for the post baby-boomer generation to experience gas lines for the first time. Remember locking gas caps? They will be making a resurgence.
8 people like this.
Reply 18 - Posted by:
Rumblehog 5/9/2021 4:08:27 PM (No. 780117)
Convert your cars to wind energy, Yankees.
8 people like this.
Reply 19 - Posted by:
lakerman1 5/9/2021 4:30:53 PM (No. 780133)
Did Jennifer Granholm have a favorable investment position on this? Perhaps in the commodities market?
4 people like this.
Reply 20 - Posted by:
djmed 5/9/2021 6:07:53 PM (No. 780172)
Honest question- why is a pipeline operating system connected to the internet? Seems really risky, obviously
3 people like this.
Reply 21 - Posted by:
MickTurn 5/9/2021 10:52:36 PM (No. 780348)
Hmmm, Where are all those supposed SMART computer experts in the NSA, CIA, etc?
It appears they are incompetent or helped this happen...which is it?
3 people like this.
Reply 22 - Posted by:
Mushroom 5/10/2021 12:40:09 AM (No. 780377)
#20 Lot of companies have done this to cut costs. Back in the day when multiple computers/switches/sensors needed to be worked remotely the company bought 2 modems and paid ma bell for a dedicated circuit.
Someone realized that they could just do it over an Internet connection. A bit smarter folks build their OWN smaller Internet (referred to as an Intranet) that only their data traveled on. It had holes in security. Then to save yet again, they went back to leasing big pipes for data and handling the last little bit themselves. A gold mine for hackers! Want to give away even MORE of your information? Store it in the 'Cloud'. Cloud is short for "I dunno where it is, I just pay the bills' You have ZERO control over that data, oh you can access it and read/write...but who else can? A bit different that a secured backed up storage matrix.
Wanna know why? They don't want to pay for techs to take care if it, they are fine with outsourcing it to India to Tata or some other far off country that works cheap.
Like the old oil filter commercial, you can pay me now or pay me later.
3 people like this.
Reply 23 - Posted by:
udanja99 5/10/2021 9:13:47 AM (No. 780605)
Gas prices were already surging and it started on 11/4/20. Xiden had already promised to shut down Keystone and fracking and the oil companies responded quickly to his “election”.
I just paid $3.17 yesterday. A year ago I was paying $1.89.
2 people like this.
Reply 24 - Posted by:
BillW. 5/10/2021 9:49:57 AM (No. 780657)
Traitor Joe has been ordered to jack up the price of gas and to push for electric cars with batteries made by Chi-Coms.
Amerikans -- some with Bidet-Heels-Up signs still in their yards -- voted for this.
1 person likes this.
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Comments:
At first it appeared the Biden administration's cyberattack was intended to enable China to keep polluting, but give credit where credit is due: using this to explain away skyrocketing gasoline prices, while also blaming the Russians, is brilliant.