Colonial Pipeline hack has taken a new twist yesterday when Congress came to learn that the company paid $5million to DarkSide Ransomware spreading hackers to free up the database from malware that led to disruption of fuel services across the United States and Australia to a certain extent. And prompting oil corporation authorities to think about hiking the Gas price from early next month if the issue remains unsolved.
FBI issued a statement that Russian intelligence might not be the culprit behind the incident. However, it did say that those residing in Russia might have launched the ransomware attack.
Biden administration or the White House declined to comment on the incident. But the Honorable President did say that the hackers will be legally prosecuted to the full extent.
As the critical infrastructure of the United States was constantly coming under threat of adversaries, the Biden administration decided to establish a cyber review board and pledged to formulate new software security standards for government agencies.
GasBuddy’s technical team’s preliminary estimates state that 73% of gas stations in Washington DC went dry and 69% of them from North Carolina were offline along with those from Georgia, Virginia, and South Carolina.
In New Jersey, the situation was a little better as only 8,000 gas stations went offline that led to the hike in the national average price of the gas by 3.12 cents.
DarkSide Ransomware hackers who were involved in the incident made it public that they would launch more such extortion campaigns on US companies in the coming weeks.
Note- UK Home Secretary Priti Patel discouraged the companies from paying a ransom as it would encourage crime and there is no guarantee that the hackers will not launch similar attacks on the same company in the future.
