Could Critical Infrastructure Suffer From A PIPEDREAM?

During the past couple of years, multiple warnings of imminent cyberattacks have seemingly gone unheeded by critical infrastructure owners and operators. Is embracing a fantasy that they won't be attacked potentially a pipedream? Both figuratively and literally, the answer is "yes."

A report filed February 14, 2023 indicates how close multiple water and Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) facilities came to being victims of a catastrophic Russian-based malware dubbed "PIPEDREAM." This malware is particularly pernicious because it can infect a broad range of industrial control systems (ICS) rather than a single, specific system. Described as a "'state-level', wartime capability," the PIPEDREAM malware has the capability of taking industrial control systems offline, creating a potentially disastrous outcome. Moreover, while earlier malwares could infect control systems through vulnerabilities in the system's software that could be remedied with a "patch," PIPEDREAM cannot