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“We are apolitical, we do not participate in geopolitics, do not need to tie us with a defined government and look for other our motives. Our goal is to make money and not creating problems for society.” That may sound like satire, but it is how the cyber criminals behind the Colonial Pipeline outage attempted to apologize. Crippling a pipeline operator and shutting off 45 percent of the gas supply and jet fuel to the East Coast was, they claim, just an accident.

The reality may not be so simple.…

The remainder of this commentary is available at defenseone.com.

Anu Narayanan is a senior engineer at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation, where her research focuses on the intersection of critical infrastructure and national security. Jonathan Welburn is an operations researcher at RAND whose work focuses on systemic risk in economic systems, supply chain risks, cybersecurity, and deterrence.

This commentary originally appeared on Defense One on May 18, 2021. Commentary gives RAND researchers a platform to convey insights based on their professional expertise and often on their peer-reviewed research and analysis.