Oil and Gas Cyber Attacks & OT Risk Infographic

The one attack that impacted regulations, practices and even politics the most profoundly was the Colonial Pipeline ransomware incident. The ransomware took down only IT computers, but the victim shut America’s largest gasoline pipeline for five days out of an “abundance of caution” to ensure that the malware did not spread into the pipeline control network. The attack was widely covered by the media, showing drivers across the East Coast facing long lineups at gas stations, stoked by fears of a regional gasoline shortage. 30 days after the outage, controversial new regulations for the nation’s largest petrochemical pipelines were created on an emergency basis. These regulations were then updated no less than three times in the following 18 months. Given that OT attacks with physical consequences are more than doubling annually, it will be less than a handful of years before we must expect incidents such as this one to become almost commonplace.