We have reached the third consecutive day of lockdown for the Colonial Pipeline pipeline, hit on Friday evening by a hacker attack that infected the systems, compromising their functioning. It is an oil pipeline 8.850 kilometers long which connects Texas to New Jersey, distributing almost half of the petrol and diesel arriving in the North East of the United States, including New York, Washington and the Atlantia airport, the most important and busiest in the United States. Supplies of 2,5 million barrels a day of gasoline, diesel and other petroleum products have been cut off.
The attack on Colonial Capital, a company owned by five major US oil groups including Shell and Koch Industries, was carried out using ransomware, a piece of malware that blocked the functioning of a server which forced the company to "put some systems offline, in order to contain the threat”. These kinds of attacks assume that the hackers unlock the systems afterwards the payment of a ransom, usually in bitcoin, by the affected company. The cyber attack, according to US investigative sources, would have been carried out by a criminal organization known as DarkSide, which claims to steal funds from large companies and corporations to distribute them to charities. However, a link with the Russian security services has not yet been ruled out. The investigations into the matter were entrusted to a specialized company, FireEye, supported by the FBI and various other government agencies.
For the time being, experts rule out that the attack could result in significant price increases of fuel at the pump, reassuring that stocks are sufficient to exclude any impact on supplies for five or six days. Despite this, the one against the Colonial Pipeline has already been defined as worst attack ever launched against a critical US infrastructure, leading the media to question the vulnerability of these strategic infrastructures.
The President of the United States, Joe Biden, was informed of the attack on the morning of May 9 and is following the story directly, a White House spokesman said, adding that the government has set to work to restore normal network operation as soon as possible. This morning Biden has declared a state of emergency which allows extraordinary measures to be activated such as the road transport of fuel and the extension of the daily working hours of American hauliers in order to facilitate the delivery of supplies.
On the oil markets Brent is up 0,7% to 68,75 dollars a barrel, the wtf it rises by 0,88% to 65,47 dollars.