Colonial Restarts Gas Pipeline Following Cyberattack

Colonial Pipeline Co. said it began to resume gasoline shipments late this week, after a cyberattack that caused fuel shortages in several states. President Biden also asked US residents not to panic buy amidst the shortage. Watch below for more thoughts from Bloomberg’s Jamie Tarabay.

Host: So, Jamie, operations resuming, when is the actual relief going to come?

Tarabay: Well, it really depends on, you know, just what Colonial is saying. From our point of view in the cybersecurity aspect that we’ve been discussing all of this time, it was only a couple of days ago that the CEO of colonial said that fuel shipments will not resume until all the ransomware has been removed from the system. So we’re really curious about what they’ve done to mitigate that.

We know that they have worked with private cybersecurity firms and with government agencies to try to figure that out. And we’re still waiting to see what they’ve actually got to say. We know that the hackers stole nearly 100 gigabytes of data from the IT network. And Colonial has said that the operational system, which handles the pipelines and the flows, have not been compromised. So whether they’ve been able to separate the two, whether they’ve been able to make one of them work or the other, we just really need to sort of hear from them. We’re not the only ones waiting to hear. In testimony to a Senate committee on Tuesday, Biden administration officials said that they’re still waiting on technical information from Colonial to be able to warn the potential victims.

And that’s the other side of this regarding a ransom, et cetera. We need to hear what the ransom, what the hackers have to say if these shipments go ahead, whether that information that the hackers are holding at ransom will be released or whether Colonial has been able to decrypt the system by itself. We know that also today that President Biden signed the cybersecurity order. And it’s really meant to make every sort of government agency and cooperation that works with governments to boost cyber security aspects and their networks and show a little more accountability and increase their communication.

*Bloomberg contributed to this content

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