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

jalopnik.com

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

#21

Post by qalmakka »

IMHO, the USA has made the mistake of privatizing too much of its crucial infrastructure, ignoring that certain things are inherently monopolistic in nature and do not benefit at all from being in private hands.

Privatizing infrastructure is extremely positive if there's any chance for competition to arise - for instance, Italy has moved from a monopolistic state phone company to a well regulated and open free market, which has caused a boom of competing companies that has massively driven prices down. I now pay €27/mo for unlimited 1Gbps/300Mbps fiber and €7/mo for my phone plan with 50 GB of data, unlimited calls and unlimited SMS.

This is offset by the sad state of our highway system, which has been handed off to private companies a long time ago. There is obviously no way to create competition in highways (what are you going to do, build a cheaper highway next to the already existing one?), so the main company (API) has been neglecting mantaining infrastructures up to the point that a few bridges have collapsed, killing people and creating huge preventable disasters. Tolls are also crazy expensive, often amounting to half the cost of a road trip (and here petrol costs €1.50 per litre).

There's no incentive for a private company to invest a single cent as soon as it becomes a monopoly, it is something that has been known since the dawn of man.

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

#22

Post by thanatos519 »

MattGaiser wrote: post #18
andrewstuart2 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think maybe you have to think about the total economic impact for the article and frustration to make more sense. Fuel is a very fundamental part of our economy and almost always goes toward producing much more value than the value of the fuel itself. Add to that, shortages can and do contribute to irreversible losses like loss of life. If every gas distributor shut down because ransomware hit them all, you could c…

> It's not too far fetched either to hope that their customers would be willing to self-report. Sure you might get some people who'd take advantage of the situation Would you bet millions of dollars on the goodness of the typical person?

> Would you bet millions of dollars on the goodness of the typical person?

Somewhere in that question is an answer to the Fermi paradox!

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

#23

Post by ComodoHacker »

darkwater wrote: post #10

How come that billing is basically ALWAYS the typical system that - no matter what - runs on Windows? SMEs software, big enterprise software and everything in between, you can have 99% of your core systems running on whatever operating system you want, or several of them, but the billing/payroll/accounting system will ALWAYS be Windows. Even if SAP has Linux/Unix versions.

I bet their billing system is custom and was developed in times when Windows was a better choice. And nobody was able (or even tried) to justify a switch since then.

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

#25

Post by sam_lowry_ »

FeepingCreature wrote: post #20
romwell wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Yes, in fact, if a store's computers go down they don't just let customers walk out the door with products and hope they get paid eventually? They better do that if they get the permission from the gov't to operate the only grocery store in the area, and people weren't able to get food otherwise.

Okay, so establish some sort of "crisis service fund" that pays out when payment processing breaks through no fault of your own. This is something the state can do at any time. Honestly, allowing a monopoly without planning something like this just seems careless. Providing service without hope of ever being paid is stupid. The market is pretty good at selecting against stupidity.

I lived both in a high-trust society and in a low-trust society. That you seem to have experienced only low-trust society may impact you worldview, but take my word for it, things are different elsewhere ;-)

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

#26

Post by sam_lowry_ »

MattGaiser wrote: post #18
andrewstuart2 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think maybe you have to think about the total economic impact for the article and frustration to make more sense. Fuel is a very fundamental part of our economy and almost always goes toward producing much more value than the value of the fuel itself. Add to that, shortages can and do contribute to irreversible losses like loss of life. If every gas distributor shut down because ransomware hit them all, you could c…

> It's not too far fetched either to hope that their customers would be willing to self-report. Sure you might get some people who'd take advantage of the situation Would you bet millions of dollars on the goodness of the typical person?

That's how credit card processing operated worldwide for many decades. That's also how hawala works. And Wikipedia, if you want a non-monetary example.

They are all literally trusting in the goodness of the typical person. And then doing some careful analysis and planning. And fraud detection for the rare misdeeds.

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

#27

Post by mschuster91 »

colechristensen wrote: post #4

The author of this article comes off as really very clueless. Yes, in fact, if a store's computers go down they don't just let customers walk out the door with products and hope they get paid eventually? As far as I understand colonial is basically a big gas station connected with a series of tubes. Look ma, the gas pump still works but it doesn't keep track of how much we pumped or charge us any more! Of course they…

> Yes, in fact, if a store's computers go down they don't just let customers walk out the door with products and hope they get paid eventually?

It's one thing with a supermarket and anonymous masses of customers, but an oil pipeline where each customer is supposed to have meters running on their side as well (as double verification to protect against technical issues)? If you can't trust your known (!) customers enough to not rip you off, something is very much off.

And even in that case: the government could have told the pipeline owners "we'll pay off any differences after settling, now go and get that pipeline up and running again".

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

#28

Post by Stranger43 »

colechristensen wrote: post #4

The author of this article comes off as really very clueless. Yes, in fact, if a store's computers go down they don't just let customers walk out the door with products and hope they get paid eventually? As far as I understand colonial is basically a big gas station connected with a series of tubes. Look ma, the gas pump still works but it doesn't keep track of how much we pumped or charge us any more! Of course they…

it's also sounding kind of like the simplification an IT clueless manager might make after too much coffee and not enough sleep.

it whats likely happened was that the hardened industrial control network was pretty much fine meaning that engineers inside of the pumping facilities could manually direct/redirect flow with all the required safeguards still in place, but that they had no plan for where to direct the flow as all information about who needed/ordered what sat in the unhardened corporate network.

This is kind of similar to what happens to warehouses and "just in time" factory lines when the order printer/queue ceases up, or is no longer fed data from the back end system, and while one might expect that the operators of critical infrastructure have a plan for minimal services when/if the unhardened corporate network fails but that plan(even if it existed) likely sat on the same unsecured and now encrypted network.

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

#29

Post by mschuster91 »

MattGaiser wrote: post #11

> didn’t actually shut down the pipeline. It impacted the billing system at the Colonial Pipeline Co., which shut it down because they were worried about how they’d collect payments. What? Did the author think that the ransomeware literally locked valves?

> Did the author think that the ransomeware literally locked valves?

In the early times of the pipeline shutdown this was exactly what was feared. Malware attacking, damaging, destroying or abusing industrial embedded devices to persist in to survive cleanups is nothing new. Stuxnet was just the tip of the iceberg.

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

#30

Post by alibarber »

sam_lowry_ wrote: post #26
MattGaiser wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not too far fetched either to hope that their customers would be willing to self-report. Sure you might get some people who'd take advantage of the situation Would you bet millions of dollars on the goodness of the typical person?

That's how credit card processing operated worldwide for many decades. That's also how hawala works. And Wikipedia, if you want a non-monetary example. They are all literally trusting in the goodness of the typical person. And then doing some careful analysis and planning. And fraud detection for the rare misdeeds.

But a credit card still keeps track of how much you spend - it doesn't rely on you honestly reporting how much you spent over the month...
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