The major problem is that most major pipelines in this country are remotely controlled from a centralized location using a process known as SCADA.
The flow of product is controlled by these systems. It is not as simple as sending someone out to those control valves and operating them manually. First they wouldn’t have enough people skilled enough to do so. Secondly the probably wouldn’t have enough laptops to handout to connect into those locations physically.
The remote sensors are hooked to to wide area networks and routed to the control center via those networks. It is expensive and sometimes not physically possible to build a private network that only the energy company data traffic is sent on.
I’m betting the hackers got onto the servers that controlled the pipeline thru a phishing attack or something similar. So Colonial had to restore their servers from their backups, check to make sure they weren’t affected, test all of the remote connections to make sure they were fed national. Not a simple task and time consuming.
I worked in that industry so I speak from a position of knowledge and experience. Our infrastructure structure is more vulnerable than anyone realizes.
Got it. Thanks
And you cannot take just anyone and have them work d o t pipeline. There are borderline punitive training requirements ... It would take at least a month to qualify people to do it manually... Nevermind that nothing has been done with only man in attendance since Fisher made the first control valve / regulator.