Home > News

FBI Confirms Darkside Behind Colonial Pipeline Ransomware Attack

By Laura Tucker
Colonial Pipeline Ransomware Featured

We tend to think of cyberattacks in terms of companies, but sometimes they can happen to much larger corporations, affecting an entire nation. This is the case with the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack – the FBI has determined the attackers of one of the largest U.S. fuel pipelines is the
“Darkside” group.

Also read: Jack Daniel’s Hit with Ransomware, Decade of Data Stolen

Colonial Pipeline Ransomware Attack

The Colonial Pipeline transports more than 100 million gallons of gasoline and other fuels on any given day from Texas to New York. The ransomware attack shut down all operations at the pipeline last week.

The attack took place amidst concerns that American infrastructure is in a vulnerable position. The current U.S. administration began tightening up cybersecurity in the country’s power grid just last month. This was after the SolarWinds breach and the Microsoft Exchange Server hack.

Colonial Pipeline Ransomware Pipes

While the administration has said that it’s ready and “standing by” to assist Colonial Pipeline, it also noted its role in doing so would be limited because the pipeline is a private company.

Russian Group Darkside Responsible for Attack

The FBI has determined that a Russian group, “Darkside,” is behind the Colonial Pipeline ransomware cyberattack. The Darkside group posted a notice on the dark web that it was not acting on behalf of a foreign government. It added that its motivation was “only to make money.”

According to Recorded Future senior security architect Allan Liska, the threat group is relatively new in ransomware operations. Though in operation less than a year, he said “they’re fairly aggressive” and have “grown very quickly.”

Colonial Pipieline Ransomware Raas

Darkside has joined the “ransomware as a service” trend. Liska explained they “rent out their infrastructure to other bad guys.” He further explained, “You pay a fee to join their service. And then the main threat actor gets a cut of every successful ransomware payment that you make.”

Recovering from the Ransomware Attack

LAST MONTH, the U.S. Justice Department said that last year was “the worst year to date for ransomware attacks.” Experts see a trend of the attacks happening more frequently.

Colonial Pipeline Ransomware Field

With the Colonial Pipeline being a significant provider of diesel, gasoline, and jet fuel, it’s assumed the ransomware attack by Darkside could lead to consequences on the economy. RBC Capital Markets said, “the supply shock could leave the region with widespread fuel shortages.”

Colonial Pipeline started working on a restart plan the weekend following the attack. It was able to resume some operations. It hopes service will be completely restored by the end of the week.

Read on to learn about seven of the best ransomware decryption tools for Windows.

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox

Laura Tucker Avatar
Laura Tucker
Laura has spent more than 20 years writing news, reviews, and op-eds, with the majority of those years as an editor as well. She has exclusively used Apple products for the past 35 years. In addition to writing and editing at MTE, she also runs the site’s sponsored review program.

Read next

Octopuses possess roughly 500 million neurons distributed across their body, with two-thirds located in their arms rather than their central brain, meaning each arm can taste, problem-solve, and react to stimuli independently of whatever the octopus is otherwise paying attention to.
Explore the historic Roman bridge in lush Salamanca, Spain captured beautifully in daylight.
The Roman aqueduct at Segovia, built around the first century AD without mortar, still carried water into the 1970s, its 167 granite arches held together by nothing but the precise weight distribution of stones cut to fit each other within fractions of a millimeter.
When the SS Great Eastern laid the first working transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866, a message that had taken ten days by steamship suddenly crossed the ocean in minutes, and the financial markets of London and New York were forced, within a single trading week, to invent the modern concept of synchronised global price.
From below of blue starry sky over radio telescope and trees with leaves
The Big Ear telescope was scanning at 1420.4056 megahertz on the night of 15 August 1977, the exact frequency at which hydrogen atoms vibrate across the universe, because Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison had argued years earlier that any species trying to be found would broadcast on that channel — and then, for 72 seconds, something did.
In 2016, archaeologists dated two rings of snapped stalagmites in France’s Bruniquel Cave to 176,500 years ago, evidence that Neanderthals had walked 336 metres into darkness with fire and built architecture deep underground long before modern humans reached Europe
Otto von Bismarck was 74 when Germany adopted the world’s first national old-age social insurance program in 1889, setting the pension age at 70 after years of fighting socialists with bans, laws, and a promise few workers would live long enough to use
When cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov stepped out of his Soyuz capsule in March 1995 after 437 consecutive days aboard Mir, doctors recorded him at several centimetres above his pre-flight height, and his spine had become so unaccustomed to gravity that the recovery team carried him to a chair rather than risk the compression of letting him walk.
When Bell Labs engineer Karl Jansky pointed a rotating antenna at the sky in 1932 looking for sources of transatlantic radio static, he kept picking up a faint hiss that peaked every 23 hours and 56 minutes, and he eventually realized he had become the first human to hear the center of the Milky Way.