While a cyberattack on an East Coast pipeline company may seem distant to us in Lake County, it does give us a stark example of something that could happen here.
Colonial Pipeline Co., which operates a 5,500-mile pipeline that delivers 45% of the gasoline and jet fuel supplied to the U.S. East Coast, said Friday that it had been the victim of a ransomware attack. The criminals get inside an organization's computer system and lock it up, or threaten to make confidential data public, demanding a ransom payment to allow the organization to use its computers again.
In this case, Colonial quickly took certain systems offline to contain the threat. The company said those actions "temporarily halted all pipeline operations and affected some of our IT systems, which we are actively in the process of restoring."