The Colonial Pipeline outage was a shock to senior decision-makers – the pipeline was shut down “in an abundance of caution” in the face of a compromised IT network, with no evidence that the OT network was affected by the ransomware. Before the outage, senior decision-makers had assumed that industrial and OT cybersecurity initiatives that pipelines and other critical infrastructures had deployed over the past fifteen years were sufficient to ensure that physical operations were independent of cyber attacks on Internet-connected IT networks. The Colonial incident proved that this was not the case.

A month after the incident, the TSA issued Security Directive Pipeline-2021-02: Pipeline Cybersecurity Mitigation Actions, Contin-gency Planning and Testing. These directives directly addressed the concern regarding pipeline outages due to compromised IT networks.

Download our latest eBook “Simplifying Network Segmentation for the TSA Pipeline Security Directive” to understand better the TSA directives and learn how to protect pipelines using Unidirectional Security Gateway products.