One day after the colonial pipeline confirmed a new system failure that the American fuel company has pointed out was not a product of a new hacking attack on society, CEO Colonial Joseph Blount dropped a bomb in a Interview with the Wall Street Journal.
Return On May 7, an employee of the fuel company discovered a ransom note from the gang of dark extortist early in the day, fixing all this chain of events moving. And at the evening sarer, BLOUNON now confirms, he had already made the decision that society would pay and accepted a range of $ 4.4 million of $ 4.4 million – since then, colonial could not be sure of the depth of hackers in their system. BLOUNT has recognized during this interview, its first since the disaster took place earlier this month, that payment was a controversial movement – indeed, the law enforcement officials and many journalists Cybersecurity have deployed that colonial actions will be kissing other ransomware the authors – but Blount is adamant: “I will admit that I was not comfortable seeing money out of the door to people like that. But it was the good thing to do for the country. “
To be sure, reasonable people may disagree on the veracity of this statement. Was it the right thing to do? Well, it turns out that the hackers of Darkside gave a colonial decryption tool that did not work so well, in exchange for payment – and, in fact, this pipeline tool has left the forced pipeline operator to recovery from its almost identical network. As if he did not have paid at all.
In addition, Gasbuddy’s crowdsourcities data reveal that at least a dozen states have suffered fuel breaks of a kind, even after colonial said, he had resumed his normal operations during the weekend. . As if it were not enough, the whole affair also took us the United States at the edge of a large national energy crisis, on the basis of a confidential analysis of the US Department of Energy as well as the National Department. internal security. According to New York Times reports, these two agencies assumed that a bad results cascade was about to unfold, if the colonial pipeline failure had disappeared a little longer. A few more days from the pipeline operational network being disconnected, for example, and the lack of diesel would have forced buses and various mass transit options to close, for one thing. And the Domino effect would also have included factories and refiners being also put on the ice – because a continuous closing of the colonial network would have left them with nowhere to distribute their product.
All this comes as a result of the gang of dark ransomware apparently felt some impact of their own repercussions of the colonial pipeline attack. Someone from a rival Ransomware Gang would have left a message on a dark web forum in recent days, which said that the founders Darkside had lost access to the site they used to welcome and publish Stolen data from their victims. Other infrastructure, such as their payment server, were also supposedly supposed to the black ring. However, there is a question about the legitimacy of these claims.
In the Related News, Colonial Pipeline confirmed that he had undergone another Tuesday network failure to try to recover from ransomware attack. However, the company stressed that there was nothing harmful behind this new problem – even if at a roundabout is indeed a kind of by-product of the previous attack. “Our internal server that executes our nomination system has experienced intermittent disturbances this morning because of some of the current hardening efforts and part of our restoration process,” said Colonial Pipeline in a statement. “These problems were not related to ransomware or any type of reinfection.”
