The Colonial Pipeline Was Fine, Shutdown to Make Sure Its Owner Would Get Paid

Re:The Colonial Pipeline Was Fine, Shutdown to Make Sure Its... by helsinkiandrew on Tuesday May 18, 2021 @04:40AM (#27192431)

The difference is that the Colonial Pipeline is seen as an important part of the US Critical National Infrastucture - without oil large parts of the economy and security system breakdown, people can die. It's protected by Homeland Security and the FBI too a much greater extent than your average store.

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Re:The Colonial Pipeline Was Fine, Shutdown to Make Sure Its... by mike_d on Tuesday May 18, 2021 @04:46AM (#27192478)

Ok, so the government steps in and says the pipeline operates without a billing system... now what?

Pipes are useless without something to flow through them, and no oil producer is going to fill the pipe without a system to get paid.

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Re:The Colonial Pipeline Was Fine, Shutdown to Make Sure Its... by helsinkiandrew on Tuesday May 18, 2021 @05:06AM (#27192579)

The story was that hackers had closed the pipeline (or the owners had closed it because its systems become compromised).

If the pipeline is seen as a piece of critical infrastructure [1] - where its closure can damage other parts of the US - then if Colonial didn't tell the FBI, CISA, the Department of Transport (or whoever is in charge of that part of infrastructure) that the reason they were closing it was because they couldn't bill their customers rather than it being a safety issue, I imagine they are in trouble.

They were lucky in that it was only down for a short period, perhaps its OK - if it had been down long enough so ambulances stopped running and food and goods weren't delivered - then I'm sure the government would have told them to restart the pipeline and billing would have been sorted out some other way.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_infrastructure_protec...

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