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The Colonial Pipeline cyber attack, orchestrated by the Darkside criminal gang, was an event that affected the distribution of fuel in 14 states in the United States and directly impacted the country’s oil production.
Tyron Perdomo, a chemical engineer with a Master’s degree in Advanced Chemical Engineering from the University of Manchester and president of Syn Oil Kem LLC, in an interview for El American explains the magnitude of the cyber-attack that affected the “freedom of Americans to refuel” and also violated the technological security of the United States.
“We are talking about basically a population that is in the vicinity of more or less 100 million people living on the East Coast that have been affected,” he said.
Perdomo explained that the Colonial Pipeline cyber attack, a pipeline that receives more than 2,000,000 barrels per day and transports refined products from Texas to New York, affected the capacity of the company’s entire information system.
In order to recover the data that Darkside had hijacked with the cyber-attack, the company decided to pay 5,000,000,000, in order to start up and reestablish the service that affected 100,000,000 people.
The specialist pointed out that in order to avoid a repetition of the problem, it will be necessary to build more storage tanks in the country so that there will not be greater shortages in the event of another cyber-attack.
“As a citizen of this country I am affected in terms of my national security, as such I would expect the government to focus on eliminating this type of problems […] at this moment the freedom of Americans to put gasoline, it is their freedom, and that should be a priority for the government of this country”, he said.
