One day after the colonial pipe confirmed the system blackouts that were all newly emphasized by US fuel companies were not products from several new hacking attacks on the company, Colonial CEO Joseph Blount dropped a bomb in an interview with the Wall Street Journal.
Back on May 7, a fuel company employee found a ransom of the Darkside squeeze gang at the beginning of the day, setting the entire chain of moving events. And at night, Blount now confirms, he has made a decision that the company will pay, agree to pay for a ransom of $ 4.4 million – because at that time, the colonial cannot ensure how deep the hackers have miled into their system. Blount admitted in this interview, the first since the disaster opened this month, that the payment was a controversial step – indeed, law enforcement officials frowned, and many Cybersecurity journalists have violated that colonial actions will venture other ransomware perpetrators – but Blount is Adamant : “I will admit that I am not comfortable to see the money out of the door for people like this. But it is the right thing to do for the country.”
To be sure, the reasonable people can disagree about the truth of the statement. Is that the right thing to do? Well, it turns out that Darkside hackers provide colonial decryption tools that don’t work properly, in exchange for payments – and, in fact, that Shoddy tool leaves a pipe operator forced to recover its network almost the same. As if it hadn’t paid at all.
In addition, the Crowdsourced data from Gasbuddy revealed that at least a dozen countries experienced several types of fuel blackouts, even after the colonial said it had continued normal operation over the weekend. As if it was not enough, all of the affairs also almost brought the US to the main national energy crisis threshold, based on the secret analysis of the US Department of Energy and the National Homeland Security Department. According to the reporting of the New York Times, the two institutions suspect that bad yields will unfold, if the colonial pipe blackouts have been a little longer. Only a few days from offline pipe operational networks, for example, and lack of diesel will force the bus and various mass transit options to be closed, for one thing. And the domino effect will also include factories and distillers on the ice – because the sustainable closure of the colonial network will leave it with a place to distribute their products.
It all came after a dark ransomware gang apparently felt some of their own impacts of a colonial pipe attack. Someone from Ransomware Gang rivals reported leaving a message in a dark web forum in the last few days that said dark founders had lost access to the sites they used to organize and publish their data from victims. Other infrastructure, such as their payment server, should also be taken from a dark ring. But there are some questions about the legitimacy of this claim.
In the related news, the colonial pipe confirmed that it suffered from other network blackouts on Tuesday in the midst of recovering from a ransomware attack. However, the company stressed that there was no evil behind this new problem – even though by the roundabout, indeed, a kind of byproduct from the previous attack. “Our internal servers who run our nomination system experience intermittent disturbances this morning because of several ongoing hardening efforts and part of our restoration process,” said the colonial pipe in a statement. “These problems are not related to ransomware or any type of reinfection.”