Can someone in the know explain RE: pipeline "hack"?

Believe it was the admin side and precautionary to shut down. It's ridiculous that our govt isn't doing anything

Basically it screws everything in the logistics chain. Add in media/social media panic, it makes it worse.

Like the rest of industry, pipelines have been automated and rely on software systems to safely operate. The automation performs basic operations like opening/closing valves, running pumps, scheduling deliveries and various other vital processes for operating a pipe. My understanding is it was a ransomware hack where the hackers shut down their internal systems in exchange for a large $ payout. Last update was they have "resolved" the issue and the pipe should be up and running by close of week.

Yep there are people / companies making money just by buying and selling product flowing through that pipe. They never actually take delivery just broker the flow so to speak

Just as a background on this, hackers usually perform these types of hacks on infrastructure for two reasons. First, they get a ton of attention which they love. Second, they are relatively easy to pull off, these type of systems, embedded systems, are generally less secure as its harder to keep them patched, sometimes when put into production they are not hardened properly because people lack the knowledge.

I honestly doubt they were looking for a payoff here, that typically critical infrastructure is required to have enough backup that they can restore from something like this, just takes times. However, back to the first point, generally when it is about attention, the group comes out and claims it, think anonymous or even terrorist groups. When groups don't come out and claim responsibility that makes the likelihood that it was a military operation much much more realistic. Think the Iranian Nuclear facilities that got hacked to such down and blast "Back in Black" on their speakers, that was a similar attack of embedded systems and it turned out to most likely be done by Isreal and CIA.

once they got into the SCADA system they could do just about anything they want to the system and once in at that point change the passwords to remove theor access. from there they can steal anything and everything from their servers including propiraty (sp) information.

Once in, it is easy to frick it all up. it is all automated and easy to manipulate. that is the point of using a SCADA system, it talks to the PLCs in the field that monitor and manipulate all the valves pumps and breakers.

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now there's a supposed gasoline shortage.

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There's not really a shortage. There's plenty of gasoline - it just can't be delivered like normal.

The pipeline wasn't hacked. A Ransomware attack on a significant portion of the company's sensitive data caused them to shut the pipeline down while they mitigated the incident.

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Once in, it is easy to frick it all up. it is all automated and easy to manipulate. that is the point of using a SCADA system, it talks to the PLCs in the field that monitor and manipulate all the valves pumps and breakers.

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One key thing you are forgetting about SCADA: There are hard limits in the protection methods, applications and interfaces you can use with SCADA because of compatibility and interoperability issues. As a result, they have significantly more vulnerabilities that cannot be patched and must be as isolated as possible.