Data System of Four Gas Pipeline Companies were Hacked

Four pipeline companies of U.S. announced the close down of their electronic system which they use to communicate with customers last couple of days, with three affirming it came about because of a cyberattack.

The Homeland Security Department said it is accumulating information regarding the prospective intrusion. Closure on Thursday affected Oneok Inc., that controls the pipelines of natural gas in Texas's Permian Basin and the region of Rocky Mountain.The Monday's attack didn't affect their work. Pipeline flow was normal.

The closedowns come after the authorities of U.S. cautioned in March that hackers from Russia are leading a broad attack on the electric grid as well as other targets of the country. The municipal government of Atlanta was limped for many days by a ransomware attack as uploaded on bloomberg.com 03/04/2018.

The system attack in the last couple of days help pipeline users communicates their requirements with the operators, utilizing a PC-to-PC exchange of records. Boardwalk Pipeline Partners LP and Energy Transfer Partners LP disclose about the breakdowns that happened on Monday.Energy Transfer, stated the reason similar toa cyberattack, its electronic information interchange system said - gave by outsider Energy Service Group LLC - came back online early in the evening, and that didn't affect the business in any possible way.

"The operations were not impacted due to this whole situation. We are taking care of all planning in-house amid this time,"a representative for Energy Transfer,Vicki Granado, revealed this news via emailed statement.

Latitude host sites utilized by around 50 pipelines for uploading notice to their users - websites that became unusable on 29th March and didn't begin returning till Monday, pipeline supervisor for information provider in Genscape Inc, Dan Spanglerin Boulder, Colorado. "Even though all the websites are up and running now, however, quite a few of them are till now missing" information for 30th March and 1st April, he said.

The systems are picking up attention from cyber-attackers since they've turned out to be "low-hanging" fruit that makes an open door for ransomware or to offer the data for sell on the dark web.

» SPAMfighter News - 4/10/2018