The Justice Department has recovered most of a multimillion-dollar ransom payment made to hackers after a cyberattack that caused the operator of the nation’s largest fuel pipeline to halt its operations last month, officials said Monday.
On Day 109, a ransomware attack on a major U.S. fuel pipeline turns up the heat on Biden’s ability to not just spend on infrastructure, but keep it secure.
Colonial Pipeline Chief Executive Joseph Blount said his company paid $4.4mln to the cybercriminal group that closed the largest US pipeline with a ransomware attack that sent American motorists scrambling to find gasoline and underscored the vulnerability of the nation’s infrastructure to hackers, the WSJ reported on Monday.
The gasoline shortage crisis on the US East Coast is slowly abating, according to industry data. The modest recovery comes as the country’s largest fuel pipeline was brought back to normal operations after a cyberattack.
Acting director of the Department of Homeland Security’s cybersecurity agency Brandon Wales warned lawmakers that more ransomware attacks are on the horizon.
Panic-buying and fuel-hoarding after the recent outage of the Colonial Pipeline network is the cause of the US gasoline price spike, according to the chairman of Alfa Energy John Hall.
The nation’s two largest crude oil distillation units were shuttered on Sunday after it was reported that the Colonial Pipeline had suffered an “outage.”
