You should be totally freaked out by the DarkSide attack on Colonial Pipeline

We’ve seen this movie before. After warnings go unheeded, a predictable, completely avoidable disaster strikes the US -- in the process, revealing a soft, exposed underbelly of risk. And the people who get paid to stop this kind of thing from happening never seem to learn, most of the time, until it’s too late -- or nearly.

This time, it was the ransomware attack on the Colonial Pipeline which took the US to the brink of a major national energy crisis, based on a confidential analysis from the US Energy Department as well as the national Homeland Security Department -- both of which surmised that a cascade of bad outcomes was about to unfold, if this Colonial Pipeline thing had gone on a little longer. Just a few more days of the pipeline’s operational network being offline, for example, and the lack of diesel would have forced buses and various mass transit options to shut down, for one thing. And the domino effect would have also included factories and refiners likewise being put on ice -- because a continued shutdown of Colonial’s network would have left them with nowhere to distribute their product.