AUSTIN, Texas — It's one of the highest-profile ransomware attacks ever, and it turns out Colonial Pipeline had recently posted a job looking for a cybersecurity manager weeks before the company was hacked, causing a major shutdown for gasoline from the Gulf Coast.
Living in a digital age can be overwhelming most days, but it requires business owners to keep up with everything that comes with it, including unwanted visitors.
Keeping those unwanted visitors out is what Zac Staples does for a living in Austin every day.
"I wish this was a one-time thing and we could be surprised by this but the truth is, we are just becoming aware at the lack of resilience we have as a society in infrastructure," said Staples
Staples is the CEO for Fathom5, a local industrial technology company. They are helping local and international business owners daily to make sure what happened to Colonial Pipeline doesn't happen to anyone else.
"Cybersecurity is not something that needs to be shoved off to the side, it is a leadership responsibility for everyone in the business to think about it and address it," said Staples
Once cybersecurity is breached, that can lead to a physical attack or harm people and day-to-day life as we know it. That's where Fred Burton comes into play. He's a former officer and a local security expert with the Ontic Center for Protection Intelligence.
"It's simply frightening as evidence of what happened with the gasoline hit and then you look back at something near to our hearts, when all of the electricity went off in Texas," said Burton "For your viewers, if you visualize that as a physical security perspective, these kinds of cyber attacks on our infrastructure today is something that could derail everything."
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