Lemming Mentality

Recently there was a cyber attack on a company that maintains a pipeline that is responsible for about half of the gas on the east coast.  It was a ransomware attack which are the most damaging, encrypting whatever data it has access to, making it unusable.  Evidently this company has some PC’s controlling pipeline operations that got locked down as a result, disrupting everything.  So when this was announced the news advised people that there was no need to panic and that gas supplies remained normal.  Of course what do human beings do when they are told to not panic, they panic.

Motorists have been flooding gas stations due to lemming mentality, worried that they will not be able to get it, despite assurances that any shortage would be short lived and minor.  Instead, because of the gas hoarding an actual shortage is now a real thing in parts of the state.  Of course in situations like this it is hard to not gloat just a little bit that I am untethered from being a slave to gas pumps with my Model Y.  It is nice to be able to drive right past the rat nest of cars lined up at pumps.  Lemming mentality is a powerful force.  These type of incidents reveal just how fragile our infrastructure really is.  It takes only a small ripple to quickly amplify to a tsunami once public panic sets in.

The state had to enact an emergency order to prevent price gouging, just like they do in hurricane situations.  The Russsian hacker that has been identified as the likely source of the ransomware attack must be rolling on the floor laughing at just how easily he can break the chain.   Expect these sort of incidents to only become more and more frequent over time, just like data breaches/leaks.  Remember when companies were blasted across the news when they had a leak of personal user data?  Not anymore, it is so commonplace it hardly gets a sentence in the media.