Today was the Senate Homeland Security hearing over the aftermath of the Colonial Pipeline hack. After yesterday’s announcement by the Department of Justice about recovering the ransom money, the timing lined up for Washington DC to host this meeting.
The coincidence was on Capitol Hill’s end as well, given this morning’s reports of another ransomware attack. This time with Capitol Hill’s own iConstituent software used by “nearly 60 House offices from both parties.”
The episode caught the USA by surprise and marked the beginning of a renewed collective focus on cyber warfare. It wasn’t the only such occasion of a newsworthy high-profile hack.
What we know from the hearing (summarized by CNN) is that Colonial Pipeline CEO Joseph Blount defended the company’s response to DarkSide’s digital assault.
However one moment in particular stood out. Senator Hawley brought up this question by mentioning the age of the pipeline (construction started back in 1962). As such the general impression he got was that Colonial Pipeline as a company was set up to handle manual production, before computers.
“Do you have the capability to manually operate the pipeline in the event (in the future) of an IT attack like this one? And if you don’t have that capability, should you?” asked Hawley.
Colonial Pipeline CEO Joseph Blount says workers who historically operated pipelines and other infrastructure manually have retired. pic.twitter.com/M2izZWFDCP
— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) June 8, 2021
CEO Joseph Blount responded:
“Senator, that's a great question, we actually did operate small portions of the pipeline manually in order to alleviate some of the fuel shortage. And the discussion took place (with the operations team) about the ability to do that, systemwide, and the response to that was: it would be quicker to get back up on our feet by correcting the corruption of the critical IT systems that we needed in order to get the pipeline system up, than operate it manually.”
Indeed Colonial Pipeline did activate manual operations during the six-day outage.
Colonial Pipeline has issued new statement: "We can now report that Line 4, which runs from Greensboro, N.C., to Woodbine, Md., is operating under manual control for a limited period of time while existing inventory is available." https://t.co/wFko0SHoJ5
— Kim Zetter (@KimZetter) May 11, 2021
Blount continues:
“But I think on a go-forward basis, there’s no question that we will look at that capability, and it’s a really interesting question because if you look at the aging workforce now, a lot of those people that did operate Colonial Pipeline and other infrastructure in America historically manually? They’re retiring or they’re gone.”
Economists have increasingly focused on the issue of the aging workforce when it comes to the current inflation situation encroaching the United States. China on their part recently made a significant move in extending the country’s child-rearing policies from allowing two to three.
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