Colonial supplies 45% of the East Coast’s fuel.

On Friday, Colonial Pipeline, the largest refined products pipeline in the United States, transporting more than 100 million gallons of fuel daily for consumers from Houston, Texas to the New York Harbor across 8,500 km, was shut down by a ransomware attack.

The New York Times said the shutdown, now in its third day, could lead to higher gas prices in the event of “prolonged downtime.”

Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack

Here is the known information on this incident.

• “This is as close as you can get to the jugular of infrastructure in the United States,” said Amy Myers Jaffe, research professor and managing director of the Climate Policy Lab, on May 8, according to Reuters. “It’s not a major pipeline. It’s the pipeline.”
• The bad actors responsible for the attack are a gang going by the name of DarkSide.
• They stole nearly 100 gigabytes of Colonial data on Thursday in just two hours, according to Reuters.
• “The Colonial Pipeline operations team is developing a system restart plan,” the company said in a Sunday release update. It said it “will bring our full system back online only when we believe it is safe to do so, and in full compliance with the approval of all federal regulations.”
• The company said it had engaged leading, third-party cybersecurity experts to investigate the matter. Cybersecurity firm FireEye (NASDAQ: FEYE) said it had been roped in.
• The Biden administration is weighing its response.
• It is not yet clear if the company has paid the ransom, or intends to do so.
• Meanwhile, the U.S. declared a regional state of emergency over the shutdown of the pipeline.
• The declaration will relax controls on transporting fuels by road.
• “A one-to-two-day outage is really a minor inconvenience,” said Andrew Lipow, president of Lipow Oil Associates. But by day four or five, he said, “We could see a much greater widespread impact through large areas throughout the mid-Atlantic and the southeast.”

Related Story:  Hackers Attack Cybersecurity Firm FireEye And Electronics Giant FoxConn

Image Credit: Colonial Pipeline