Colonial Pipeline Is Running Again, But the Pain Isn't Over

Colonial Pipeline flipped the switch back on over the weekend, roughly six days after a ransomware attack forced it to shut down the largest fuel pipeline in the country. That’s the headline. The less comforting part is that “restarted” and “back to normal” are two very different things, and right now we’re only at the first one.

If you’ve driven past a gas station in the Southeast this past week, you already know what I mean. Lines wrapped around blocks, hand-scrawled “out of gas” signs, people filling plastic bags with fuel because they panicked and grabbed whatever container was nearby. That last one deserves its own rant, but the short version is: don’t do that, ever, for any reason.

The pipeline itself moving oil again doesn’t instantly refill every tank at every station. Fuel has to physically travel from the pipeline terminals to distribution hubs to the trucks that supply individual stations, and that process was already strained before the shutdown even happened, thanks to a week of panic buying that drained supply faster than it normally would. Multiple states are still reporting that a third or more of their gas stations are completely dry, and that’s expected to drag on for several more days at least, maybe longer in the hardest-hit metro areas.

The part that should worry you more than the gas lines

What’s more interesting to me than the fuel shortage — which is a logistics problem that will resolve itself given enough time — is what this incident says about how fragile critical infrastructure security actually is. A single ransomware attack, reportedly from a group called DarkSide, took down a pipeline responsible for a huge share of fuel on the East Coast. Not through some exotic zero-day in industrial control systems, but through what sounds like a fairly standard corporate network compromise that then cascaded into an operational shutdown out of an abundance of caution.

That’s the pattern worth paying attention to. It’s rarely the SCADA systems themselves getting popped in these stories — it’s the IT side, and companies pulling the plug on operations because they can’t be sure the infection hasn’t spread, or because the systems that handle billing and logistics are too intertwined with the ones that actually move product. Segmentation between IT and OT networks has been “best practice” advice for a decade. Incidents like this are a pretty blunt reminder of how many organizations still haven’t gotten there.

Expect a lot of noise in the coming weeks: congressional hearings, calls for mandatory reporting requirements for pipeline operators, maybe some movement on cyber insurance requirements for critical infrastructure. Whether any of it turns into real regulation, or just a news cycle that fades once the gas lines disappear, is the actual question. Infrastructure operators have gotten warnings like this before. The pattern usually is a flurry of attention, a few audits, and then quiet until the next one.

For now, if you’re in an affected area: the supply is coming back, just give it more time than you’d like. And maybe don’t fill up a trash bag with gasoline.