re: Can someone in the know explain RE: pipeline "hack"?

Just as a background on this, hackers usually perform these types of hacks on infrastructure for two reasons. First, they get a ton of attention which they love. Second, they are relatively easy to pull off, these type of systems, embedded systems, are generally less secure as its harder to keep them patched, sometimes when put into production they are not hardened properly because people lack the knowledge.

I honestly doubt they were looking for a payoff here, that typically critical infrastructure is required to have enough backup that they can restore from something like this, just takes times. However, back to the first point, generally when it is about attention, the group comes out and claims it, think anonymous or even terrorist groups. When groups don't come out and claim responsibility that makes the likelihood that it was a military operation much much more realistic. Think the Iranian Nuclear facilities that got hacked to such down and blast "Back in Black" on their speakers, that was a similar attack of embedded systems and it turned out to most likely be done by Isreal and CIA.