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

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

#81

Post by IQunder130 »

andrewstuart2 wrote: post #9
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…

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.

Spoken like someone who has never done business.

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

#82

Post by ForHackernews »

Hamuko wrote: post #67
ForHackernews wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Texas recently shut down their power grid when it got cold out because it was cheaper than weatherproofing or suffering the regulations to interconnect with other neighbouring states.

That's not in any way similar. The Colonial Pipeline was not shut down because they ran out of petroleum to distribute.

Grandparent commenter with "Austin" in his name was saying his power gets shut off even w/out ransomware. Parent commenter asked "when?" and I answered the question.

I'm not taking a position on the similarity or dissimilarity between shutting down a service because you can't bill accurately and shutting down a service because you refuse to interoperate with other providers.

All I'm saying is Texas customers did get their electricity cut off recently.

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

#83

Post by daniellarusso »

ComodoHacker wrote: post #61
Stranger43 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At what point in history was that? Unix(tm) and mainframes predate windows server by a far margin and was never seen as inferior to windows by the wider sysadmin community, there might have been a time when windows server had merit as the discount solutions for people who could not afford highly available Unix boxen, but it was never seen as superior or particularly well suited for critical infrastructure. I think th…

That was until 15-20 years ago. *nix OSes may have been as far superior to Windows as you can imagine, but the development ecosystem certainly wasn't. There were Delphi, VB and other RAD tools for Windows, with tons of GUI and general purpose libraries and toolkits. Bun on *nix you basically had just GCC and vim/emacs. There were no GitHub, no npm, no AWS, nothing. If you'd compare TCO of an enterprise app plus neces…

Anecdotal, but working in retail in the 90s, the backend system was some *nix server, the wireless Telxon guns ran DOS 3.2, and there was a dedicated OS/2 Warp desktop that would perform reporting and aggregate data.

I am not sure what the registers ran, but they were IBM, all text-based.

Also, I remember my friend was a manager at AMC theatres at the time, and their system was entirely text-based. I remember watching him run end-of-day reports and you could see it zip up the files and hear the modem dial out and connect to corporate.

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

#84

Post by daniellarusso »

cube00 wrote: post #44
Stranger43 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At what point in history was that? Unix(tm) and mainframes predate windows server by a far margin and was never seen as inferior to windows by the wider sysadmin community, there might have been a time when windows server had merit as the discount solutions for people who could not afford highly available Unix boxen, but it was never seen as superior or particularly well suited for critical infrastructure. I think th…

Thick desktops were ruled by Windows so if you wanted a custom application it was Microsoft Visual Basic or Visual C++, Java as desktop apps didn't seem to catch on for the enterprise. Even if you tried to bring an application to the web back in the 90s you could still end up caught in the Microsoft ecosystem via ActiveX.

Depending on the version of Windows, it may not have even had native TCP/IP support by default.

Trumpet Winsock was a very important piece of software for a bit, from Windows 3 to 98.

Serial ports were much more popular back then.

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

#85

Post by crispyambulance »

cowsandmilk wrote: post #64
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…

Frankly, you seem to lack knowledge here. Your example of a grocery store is B2C with no knowledge of the customers. The pipeline is B2B with legal contracts in place and use invoices. You can order dozens of types of oil through the pipeline. With travel distances of thousands of miles, many destinations, and the need for product segregation, the pipeline knows where all the oil is going. If they couldn’t track segr…

It's understandable why they would shut it down temporarily if they could no longer accurately bill customers for usage.

At some point, however, it starts impacting the economy and there would have to measures in place to get the fuel going regardless of whether the corporate bean-counters (and their malware infested computers) were fully "ready". I don't know what that point in time should be. But the fact that there were news stories of imbeciles hoarding gasoline and emptying fully loaded gas stations within a couple of hours certainly makes it urgent to get the pipeline running sooner. Can't we all just get along?

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

#86

Post by daniellarusso »

erentz wrote: post #7
Guthur wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even so, some one has to pay, and the government wouldn't be keen on just handing out free fuel either.

If the power grid in your area loses its billing system should it just shut down? What I don’t get is why they couldn’t gather the data manually to keep things running and sorted it out after the fact. They didn’t have any DR planning for something like this? Station people with clipboards and cameras at all meters. Measure the inputs and outputs as they occur. It seems there was just no real impetus to act responsib…

Who do you hire to do that?

How quickly can you train them?

Where do they send the collected information?

How is the collected info processed and aggregated?

How much money is lost doing the above versus just shutting down?

I think their DR was fine. It is the HA that was not.

$5mil from net revenue of $400 mil is less than 2% of profits, and it has been operating for 80 years.

Honestly, I think the environmental damage the pipeline has caused is much worse.

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

#87

Post by chiefalchemist »

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…

Regardless, the moral of the story is this:

To hack and shut down infrastructure does *not* require penetrating the actual infrastructure. Instead there are (likely far more vulnerable) "support systems" that if compromised will have the same effect. Why pick a hardened target when a soft one will do?

It's like arresting Al Capone. He didn't go down for all the violence, etc., instead it was tax evasion.

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

#88

Post by Stranger43 »

ComodoHacker wrote: post #61
Stranger43 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At what point in history was that? Unix(tm) and mainframes predate windows server by a far margin and was never seen as inferior to windows by the wider sysadmin community, there might have been a time when windows server had merit as the discount solutions for people who could not afford highly available Unix boxen, but it was never seen as superior or particularly well suited for critical infrastructure. I think th…

That was until 15-20 years ago. *nix OSes may have been as far superior to Windows as you can imagine, but the development ecosystem certainly wasn't. There were Delphi, VB and other RAD tools for Windows, with tons of GUI and general purpose libraries and toolkits. Bun on *nix you basically had just GCC and vim/emacs. There were no GitHub, no npm, no AWS, nothing. If you'd compare TCO of an enterprise app plus neces…

Dont make the mistake of thinking that the crap that was the pure gnu toolchain was in any way equal to what was available for those who could afford to run commercial unix(tm), it was an completely different world that Linux would not catch up to until the 00's mostly by absorbing frameworks and software from the world of commercial unix(tm) and from more recent developments.

I dont think i can recall any commercial Unix even shipping gcc back in the day.

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

#89

Post by austincheney »

Hamuko wrote: post #67
ForHackernews wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Texas recently shut down their power grid when it got cold out because it was cheaper than weatherproofing or suffering the regulations to interconnect with other neighbouring states.

That's not in any way similar. The Colonial Pipeline was not shut down because they ran out of petroleum to distribute.

The Texas power grid didn’t run out of fuel either. It was known there needed to be controlled outages a couple weeks in advance. What wasn’t known was the scale or duration of the problem.

At any rate you are just looking for something to cry about. You asked for a hypothetical counter example not expecting to get one and now are splitting hairs to qualify big tears.

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

#90

Post by salawat »

erentz wrote: post #7
Guthur wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even so, some one has to pay, and the government wouldn't be keen on just handing out free fuel either.

If the power grid in your area loses its billing system should it just shut down? What I don’t get is why they couldn’t gather the data manually to keep things running and sorted it out after the fact. They didn’t have any DR planning for something like this? Station people with clipboards and cameras at all meters. Measure the inputs and outputs as they occur. It seems there was just no real impetus to act responsib…

That's expensive. You have to have someone do all that paerwork, the paperwork has to exist (printing and doc management), and there needs to be a hard copy of the business agreement on a per customer basis.

I mean, I'm kinda old timey, so ot"s not infeasible from my point of view; but in today's hyper-optimized, bottom-line over-fault-tolerance world, I don't see that happen all that much.

Heck, I have trouble getting a straight answer out of the youngin's to "What is a filing system?"

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