Although it has been almost a month since the cyberattack on the Colonial Pipeline Company took place. Still, more information keeps coming in regards to how the company managed to get off the hook and re-instate its services.
It was on Tuesday, June 8, when the CEO of Colonial Pipelines confirmed what the company had to do in order to keep the operations running. The CEO confirmed what they had to do to deal with the problem when he was summoned in front of the Senate committee.
The CEO of Colonial Pipeline Systems revealed that their company had to pay $5 million in the form of ransom. They did it after the first day of being hacked by cybercriminals. The company revealed that the hackers were from Russia and they had hacked into their IT network.
As a result, they had gained full control of their pipeline system and took it down entirely. This resulted in the entire East Coast running out of fuel, gas, jet fuel, and other fueling sources. As a result, the analysts had also predicted that the price of fuel in the particular region would also increase.
In the light of the above, the company had to do something fast and quick in order to get the issue sorted. This is the reason why the company went ahead with the decision of paying up $5 million to the cybercriminals in a bid to take back control of the systems.
The CEO, Joseph Blount Jr. shared the details with the Governmental Affairs Committee and the Senate Homeland Security at the session. Blount Jr. revealed that they had been notified of the cyberattack on May 7 at 05:00 am.
They established the hack attack when one of the security team members found a note for ransom on one of the systems. The hackers went straight for the IT networking team’s system and left the note there for the ransomware.
The hackers revealed that they had already accessed the data that was available in the shared internal drive of the company. The hackers revealed that they had already stolen all the files and they were not going to return them until a ransom was paid.
The hackers had reportedly demanded a ransom higher than $5 million but finally decided to settle it for $5 million. The CEO also revealed that it was DarkSide that had carried out the attack with the help of a ransomware program. DarkSide is reportedly a group of cybercriminals known to operate out of Russia.
The CEO revealed that they had too much at stake, which is the reason why they had to make the decision fast and pay the hackers $5 million.