According to recent article posted by Reporter, David Jones, our country's cybersecurity precautions in the energy sector has been lacking for some time. Many experts in the field share a growing concern for the industry's cybersecurity and the recent Russian attack on the Colonial Pipeline put more experts into a frenzy. As technology increases by the day, natural gas, oil, utilities and water systems are relying more and more on digital technologies to facilitate operations.

As the Colonial Pipeline restores service, security researchers are working overtime to better understand what happened and how this can be prevented in the future. According to reporter David Jones,

"The attack exposed years of underinvestment and inaction that dragged out much needed enhancements to energy, utilities, water and other systems that desperately needed additional protection against sophisticated nation-state and criminal adversaries."

Experts in the field are working to prevent this from happening again. VP of global security and chief information security officer at Rockwell Automation, Dawn Cappelli stated,

"CISOs in companies that have OT environments should immediately create a holistic cybersecurity strategy for their converged IT/OT infrastructure, if they haven't done so already. This requires a cross functional team composed of IT, security and OT engineers."