If you want to understand what the Government is doing about it, here's Beau on the subject with a good explainer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTCx4t2EA8Q
If you want to know what the deal is with the control and information technology, here is an informative thread on Hacker News
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27101092
Krystal and Saagar give a fairly balanced "news" view of things
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGcr-rECQso
They unfortunately call for Government intervention in terms of "crackdown", which would, in my opinion, just make this type of thing happen MORE often, as companies will be more strongly incentivized to HIDE incidents, and simply pay the ransom and hope for the best. Years of construction and careful management can be undone in minutes if a malicious program opens and closes the valves in the right manner, as millions of pounds of fluid in motion can hammer its way out of anything if the valves aren't sequenced right, leading to years of repair, and environmental disaster.
The NSA (National Security Agency) is SUPPOSED to help secure our nation, but they seem to be far more interested in spying on everyone instead, and work to keep our systems vulnerable to support that covert goal.
There are devices that can prevent this from happening again, called data diodes, that allow information to flow between networks in ONLY one direction. All the SCADA systems which do the controlling of the pipeline have to be on their own network, and the only connection to the outside world should be through data diodes so that nothing outside can influence them.
Eventually the money will be spent, but until them, our nation, and in fact ALL of humanity is vulnerable.
