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Biden: Retaliation against the pipeline hackers not ruled out.

4 min read

RWNJs spent more time today demonizing COVID data whistleblower Rebekah Jones rather than focusing on the various data violations and network attacks happening regionally, causing panics over fuel supplies.

The real news is the ransom amount of 5 million dollars paid to the Russian hacking group.

Colonial Pipeline paid nearly $5m to ransomware group DarkSide following a cyberattack that forced the company to shut down its pipeline for six days, Bloomberg reports.

Initial reports indicated that the Georgia-based company had no intention to pay the extortion fee while it attempted to restore full service to its operating system. But multiple sources told Bloomberg that Colonial Pipeline paid the hefty ransom in untraceable cryptocurrency on Friday.


DarkSide, a Russian-based hacker group, was named by the FBI on Monday as being responsible for the ransomware attack that Colonial Pipeline first reported on Friday.…

President Joe Biden took questions from assembled media after addressing the nation about the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack earlier this week that has left many Southern states struggling with significant gas shortages.

In his initial remarks, Biden revealed that he did not believe that the Russian Government was a part of the attack, though evidence shows that the hacker group was operating from Russian territory. He was pressed on this by an unidentified reporter who asked if he was confident that Russian President Vladimir Putin was not behind the attacks.

“I am confident that I’ve read the report of the FBI accurately,” Biden replied. “And they say they were not, he was not, the government was not.”

“Will you consider cyberattacks to shut down these criminals,” he was then asked, “Are you ruling that out?”

President Biden then paused to very carefully answer, to which he said “no.”…

But it is clear that this is a landmark attack: It shows how vulnerable a nation’s energy infrastructure is and how profitable online extortion can be. Even though the Biden administration has just issued new rules on cybersecurity, it hasn’t yet offered ransomware victims any guidance about what to do or how to recover.

We don’t have good data on how common ransomware attacks are or how much money is involved. Businesses in the United States are not required to report most ransomware attacks. But evidence suggests that online extortion has become more frequent and more lucrative for criminals in recent years. Now, ransomware has become well established enough that other criminal businesses provide ransomware-as-a-service, renting their tools to the criminals who actually carry out the attacks.

The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued a joint statement attributing the Colonial Pipeline compromise to a group called DarkSide that provides ransomware-as-a-service products to other criminals. If you don’t have the technical skills to develop your own “malware” (harmful software), you can go to a provider like DarkSide, which will effectively rent you the code and infrastructure you need.

DarkSide wouldn’t be making that service available and people wouldn’t be paying for it if there wasn’t money to be made. Several factors make ransomware profitable and easy to get away with. Unlike stealing payment card numbers or other personal information, the perpetrators of ransomware schemes don’t have to find buyers for their stolen information on the black market. Instead, they can sell it right back to their victims. They don’t need to worry about whether the information is valuable to anyone else, or whether there’s so much similar information — as with stolen credit card numbers — available on black market forums that they can’t get a good price. And since their crime doesn’t involve payment card or identity fraud, it’s unlikely to be stopped by the banks or government agencies looking for financial fraud.…

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