By now, we have all heard about last week’s Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack that caused a shutdown of the 5,500-mile pipeline responsible for carrying fuel from refineries along the Gulf Coast to New Jersey. After six days, the company announced the pipeline launched the restart of its operations Wednesday evening and that it’ll take several days for service to return to normal. But Colonial’s information technology (IT) department — and the cybersecurity community as whole — could have ensured this never happened.
The attack was stoppable because ransomware isn’t new. And we could have stopped and avoided it. How?