US main pipeline network closed after “cybersecurity attack” Cybersecurity News

Colonial Pipeline, which supplies fuel to the east coast of the U.S., says it has temporarily suspended all pipeline operations after the hack.

A major U.S. pipeline operator has had to shut down its entire network after a cyberattack, the company said.

Colonial Pipeline-a statement that he was the victim of a “cybersecurity attack” late on Friday.

“In the face of this, we have proactively taken some offline systems to contain the offline threat, which has temporarily halted all pipeline operations and affected some of our IT systems,” he said.

The Colonial network supplies fuel from the U.S. Gulf Coast refineries to the people of the eastern and southern United States.

The company transports 2.5 million barrels a day of gasoline, diesel, aircraft fuel and other refined products through 8,850 km (5,500 miles) of pipelines.

Colonial Pipeline says it transports 45% of the east coast’s fuel supply.

“This attack threatens systems that control pipeline infrastructure because the attack was too sophisticated or the systems were not well secured,” said Mike Chapple, a professor and former computer scientist at Mendoza University in Notre Dame University. With the U.S. National Security Agency.

“This closure of the pipeline continues to weaken the basic elements of our national infrastructure in the face of cyberattacks,” Chapple told Reuters news agency.

In a statement, the company said it had hired a private security company to investigate and enforce the hack and contacted U.S. federal authorities.

“At the moment, our main focus is to restore our service safely and efficiently and to make an effort to get it back to normal operation. This process is already underway,” he said.

In recent months, the U.S. has been shocked to learn of two major cybersecurity violations.

The SolarWinds massive hack He endangered thousands of U.S. government and private sector computer networks and officially blamed Russia; while another hack Microsoft email servers.

The latter is believed to have affected at least 30,000 U.S. organizations including local governments and has been blamed on an aggressive Chinese cyberespionage campaign.

Both breaches appeared to be aimed at stealing emails and data, but they also created “backdoors” to allow attacks on physical infrastructure, The New York Times reported.