Sounds like a lyric from a Pet Shop Boys song.

The hackers who assaulted Colonial Pipeline, ostensibly for ransom, claim they

only want[] to make money, not disrupt society….

Never mind that their attack on a major oil pipeline does precisely that disruption.

Never mind, either, that these hackers aren’t total idiots—they knew their assault would disrupt a major segment of our economy and so our society. That was the purpose of the attack; this was no petty criminal act. Demanding to be paid by their victim is simply a distraction.

They claimed this, also:

From today we introduce moderation and check each company that our partners want to encrypt to avoid social consequences in the future.

Right. And they have some bridges across the Reka Vop’ to sell us, also. All illegal behavior, much less terrorist behavior, if left unanswered has social consequences.

No, these…personages…have simply applied a Willy Sutton tenet to their terrorism:

Go where the money is. Go there often.

Our Federal government, actively aided by our State governments, need to get aggressive with active responses to such attacks. The time for passivity, for merely acting defensively after the fact, is long past. Terrorists, physical or cyber, network entities or state-sponsored, need to be burned to the ground.

The negligence of company CEOs, COOs, and CIOs, including those officers at Colonial Pipeline, in not being serious about hardening their systems, also badly wants sanction.

Automakers are starting to adjust their level of dependence on Just in Time manufacturing, a technique whereby manufacturers vastly reduce inventory holding costs by having the relevant inputs—car parts, for instance—arrive at the factory just before they’re needed. In some of the more extreme cases, that includes arriving on the moving assembly line just before it’s needed for addition to the growing product.

The hyperefficient auto supply chain symbolized by the words “just in time” is undergoing its biggest transformation in more than half a century, accelerated by the troubles car makers have suffered during the pandemic. After sudden swings in demand, freak weather, and a series of accidents, they are reassessing their basic assumption that they could always get the parts they needed when they needed them.
“The just-in-time model is designed for supply chain efficiencies and economies of scale,” said Ashwani Gupta, Nissan Motor Co’s chief operating officer. “The repercussions of an unprecedented crisis like Covid highlight the fragility of our supply-chain model.”

That’s true, and it’s also good that that fragility finally is being taken seriously.

There are two other factors in JIT supply chain fragility beside those largely innocent ones. One is the fact that an enormous amount of trade goods, including raw materials and components for assembly into larger components or finished products, passes through the South China Sea. A large majority of Japan’s inputs and trillions of dollars of value for the US pass through the that Sea. Those shipping lanes are at increasing risk from an increasingly aggressive and acquisitive People’s Republic of China.

The other source is supply chain disruption by union strikes. Strikes generally and supply disruption by strikes are ways in which unions extort concessions out of manufacturers.

Inventory on hand, rather than on trucks or rail cars, helps manufacturers get through those deliberate disruptions.