7 Crisis Management Lessons From Colonial Pipeline’s Response To Cyber Attack

Over 5,500 miles of pipe make up the Colonial Pipeline. This pipeline begins in Texas and travels all the way up to New Jersey, providing approximately half of the East Coast’s fuel needs.

Gasoline, jet fuel, and heating oil are all transported by the Colonial Pipeline. The main office of Colonial Pipeline is located in Alpharetta, Georgia.

The hack of Colonial Pipeline was the largest known cyberattack against U.S. infrastructure. The assault on Colonial Pipeline’s computer networks was multi-pronged.

7 Crisis Management Lessons From Colonial Pipeline’s Response To Cyber Attack

The attack did not directly affect the pipeline’s operating technology systems, which are what really move the oil.

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7 Lessons Learned in Crisis Management

Some important lessons for responding to and managing crises were learned by corporate leaders in the wake of last year’s Colonial Pipeline attack.

Tell People What Happened

The corporation said last night that “… it was the target of a cybersecurity attack” in a statement published on its website. As a result, we took preventative measures by shutting down vulnerable infrastructure.

Prioritize Awareness

Focus on Education

The cybersecurity drama at Colonial Pipeline demonstrated the importance of giving staff more information.

About how to spot potential threats to a company’s infrastructure. Businesses could do better if they invested in email training for their staff.

Changes Matter

There were multiple parties involved, but it was Colonial Pipeline whose security was compromised.

After hearing about the data breach, several prominent people altered their behaviour significantly.

A Successful Breach Breed Other Hacking Efforts

Once a breach has been made, subsequent attempts to break in will be made much more frequently.

The attack on the Colonial Pipeline has had repercussions, with a subsequent increase in phishing attempts against businesses in the energy industry.

One campaign sought to trick Microsoft 365 users into updating to ransomware by pretending to be from the IT support team and providing instructions.

The Importance of IT Governance

During his evidence before the United States Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.

Colonial Pipeline President and CEO Joseph Blount said, “We believe the attacker exploited a legacy virtual private network (VPN) profile that was not intended to be used.”

Send the Correct Message

Sobel hoped that the preventative measures would deter a repeat attack by the same perpetrators and signal to others that Colonial would respond forcefully to any conflict.

Isolate the Issue

Xact IT Solutions was established by Bryan Hornung, who also goes by that name. “The first thing you want to do with any cyber attack is isolate the problem by isolating it from the network,” he said.

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Conclusion

Oil and gas, and the energy industry as a whole, are under increasing threat. Attackers can be either large, well-funded organisations like nation states or smaller.

ess well-resourced groups like hacktivists who are opposed to energy projects or advancements and want to make their opposition known by disrupting them.

IBM’s X-Force Threat Intelligence Index 2021 forecasts that the energy industry will be the third most targeted by cybercriminals in 2020, up from ninth in 2019.