Tag Archive for: pipeline

Colonial Pipeline latest in ballooning ransomware epidemic

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The international nature of ransomware crime is also an impediment to bringing it under control. The Justice Department and FBI are working with allies and partners overseas to investigate criminal rings, disrupt their operations and online infrastructure, and prosecute hackers, officials said. In January, the department joined Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Britain in dismantling the botnet known as Emotet, which had infected hundreds of thousands of computers in the United States and caused millions of dollars in damage worldwide. The botnet, an army of hijacked computers, could also be used to spread ransomware.

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Pipeline hack update: Colonial reopens across the map, ransomware payment

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Fuel tanks are seen at Colonial Pipeline Baltimore Delivery in Baltimore

Colonial Pipeline was the target of a ransomware attack that forced it to shut down operations.


Jim Watson/Getty Images

Colonial Pipeline, which shut down after a ransomware attack last week, said its entire system had resumed normal operations, a development that will help relieve concerns of a gas shortage along the East Coast of the US.

In a series of tweets early Saturday, the pipeline operator said it is “delivering millions of gallons per hour” to the markets it served. The company said it delivers 100 million gallons of fuel a day.

Colonial had been closed since last Friday, when a ransomware infection was found on its computer systems. The shutdown affected the supply of gas in parts of the East Coast, with some people waiting an hour or more at filling stations or not finding gas at all. State and federal officials had warned against hoarding and panic buying that could exacerbate the problem.

The ransomware infection at Colonial highlighted the vulnerability of the country’s critical infrastructure, which has been the target of an increasing number of cyberattacks. Cities, schools and hospitals have all been hit by cybercriminals, who scramble a victim’s computers and then extort a payment to decrypt them.


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Colonial Pipeline Paid DarkSide Hackers $5M to Restore Systems

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(TNS) — Colonial Pipeline Co. paid nearly $5 million to Eastern European hackers on Friday, contradicting reports earlier this week that the company had no intention of paying an extortion fee to help restore the country’s largest fuel pipeline, according to two people familiar with the transaction.

The company paid the hefty ransom in difficult-to-trace cryptocurrency within hours after the attack, underscoring the immense pressure faced by the Georgia-based operator to get gasoline and jet fuel flowing again to major cities along the Eastern Seaboard, those people said. A third person familiar with the situation said U.S. government officials are aware that Colonial made the payment.

Once they received the payment, the hackers provided the operator with a decrypting tool to restore its disabled computer network. The tool was so slow that the company continued using its own backups to help restore the system, one of the people familiar with the company’s efforts said.


A representative from Colonial declined to comment, as did a spokesperson for the National Security Council. Colonial said it began to resume fuel shipments around 5 p.m. Eastern time Wednesday.

The hackers, which the FBI said are linked to a group called DarkSide, specialize in digital extortion and are believed to be located in Russia or Eastern Europe.

On Wednesday, media outlets including The Washington Post and Reuters, also based on anonymous sources, reported that the company had no immediate intention of paying the ransom.

Ransomware is a type of malware that locks up a victim’s files, which the attackers promise to unlock for a payment. More recently, some ransomware groups have also stolen victims’ data and threatened to release it unless paid — a kind of double extortion.

The FBI discourages organizations from paying ransom to hackers, saying there is no guarantee they will follow through on promises to unlock files. It also provides incentive to other would-be hackers, the agency says.

However, Anne Neuberger, the White House’s top cybersecurity official, pointedly declined to say whether companies should pay cyber ransoms at a…

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The Colonial Pipeline Hack: A New Era of Cyberwar

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Holding tanks at Colonial Pipeline’s Linden Junction Tank Farm in Woodbridge, N.J. (Colonial Pipeline/Handout via Reuters)

On the menu today: a deep dive into what appears to be a frightening new era of cyberwarfare and ransomware — because the Colonial Pipeline hack and extortion was only the highest-profile example this week; this kind of crime and terrorism is taking off like a rocket.

Suddenly, Ransomware Is Everywhere

Apparently, ransomware attacks are like the latest TikTok dance: rapidly growing in popularity and not easily understood by anyone over the age of 30. You’ve heard about the Colonial Pipeline hack. But you probably didn’t hear that Ireland’s health service shut down its computer systems after being hit with a ransomware attack. DarkSide hit Toshiba Corporation and compromised more than 740 gigabytes of information including passports and other personal information. The Washington, D.C., police just suffered the biggest hack of a police force ever, exposing “hundreds of police officer disciplinary files and intelligence reports that include feeds from other agencies, including the FBI and Secret Service.” The city government of Gary, Ind., has to restore and rebuild all of its servers after they were attacked.

And that’s just in the past 24 hours or so.

One of the oddities of the Die Hard movie series is that none of the movies started out with a script for a Die Hard movie; they were all adaptations of scripts for previously written different novels and other movies, and altered to fit the John McClane character.

The fourth movie, Live Free or Die Hard, actually started not as a novel or a screenplay, but as a nonfiction article in Wired magazine. Written in 1997 and titled “A Farewell to Arms,” it laid out the United States’ vulnerability to cyberattacks on its critical infrastructure.

The closing paragraphs of that Wired article warn about the emerging era of information warfare, which “includes electronic warfare, tactical deception, strategic deterrence, propaganda warfare, psychological warfare, network warfare, and structural sabotage”:

When the threat everyone’s talking about is from…

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