A major cyber-ransom attack has shut down a major pipeline and is leading to gas shortages in the southeast United States. Bloomberg. Gas stations in Florida, North Carolina and Alabama are seeing shortages with some stations out of gas and others imposing limits as cars stack up. The pipeline was attacked by a ransomware collective known as DarkSide and Colonial Pipeline says the pipeline will not be fully operational until this weekend. With the pipeline shut down emergency shipments of fuel are being sent by truck. The attack is having an effect on gas prices in areas not even in the service area of the pipeline due to increased demand. The timing of the attack was unfortunate due to the summer driving season beginning soon.
Video coming out of Asheville, North Carolina show the fuel shortage in effect.
— Marie Oakes (@TheMarieOakes) May 11, 2021
Some gas stations are completely out of supply, while others have lineups. pic.twitter.com/7xrSoPA99G
My Comment:
Some people on the left were saying that Joe Biden was going to be the next FDR. It seems pretty clear that he's going to be the next Jimmy Carter. Carter had a major gas crisis where people had to wait in line for hours for gasoline that wasn't even there. And now we are seeing that again under Biden as well.
Hopefully this crisis won't last as long as Carter's mess did. In theory the situation should be resolved by the weekend, but that is a long time. With a panic buy already on gas stations will probably be out of fuel in a couple of days. When the fuel runs out things will get ugly. People won't be able to drive to work, businesses won't be able to ship their products and everything could shut down for awhile.
It's fairly insane to me that the cyber security at this pipeline company would be so terrible. Not only is it a major business, it's a strategic asset and as such it should have the best security money can buy. But on the other hand it only takes one idiot opening the wrong e-mail to bring down an entire company.
If some random hacker collective could do this, imagine what a state actor could do during a time of war? Our gas infrastructure is only a small part of our economy and just taking out our largest pipeline could bring much of our economy to a halt. If these hackers had hit our power plants or hospitals things could have gone much worse.
I think Biden's energy policy has a lot to do with the problems here. He canceled the Keystone pipeline and has banned fracking on federal lands. This has damaged our supplies and made it harder to respond to this crisis. This was always going to be a disaster if it happened but much of the damage could have been mitigated.
This will also have a major impact on gas prices. The prices have already doubled since the low days of the Coronavirus pandemic and now have about a dollar more than they were before than pandemic. This will only make things worse as the panic buy will increase demand and the prices aren't likely to go down immediately after the crisis is resolved.
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