Colonial Pipeline: business shutdown can follow IT compromise
The pipeline stopped even though the operational systems were not the ones compromised.
Billing and business systems were hit, and the company could not confidently determine what to charge or track, so it halted the physical operation. It is the clearest illustration that IT and OT being separate does not mean an IT incident leaves operations running, because the business decisions that govern operations live on the IT side.
More on Real incident lessons
- Equifax: knowing about a vulnerability is not knowing it is patchedThe list said five
- Target: supplier access showed why third-party portals need strong segmentation from sensitive systemsThe partitions stop short
- Help-desk identity processes are attack surfaces when social engineering can trigger password resets or MFA transferThree answers, and it moves
- British Library: recovery can outlast initial disruptionThe outage was the short part
- Hawaii false missile alert: test and live alert paths need separation because confirmation prompts cannot correct a convinced operatorA hand apart
- CrowdStrike 2024: trusted security software can be concentration riskOne roller, every machine