WASHINGTON- Colonial Pipeline reportedly paid almost $5 million in ransom to the European hackers responsible for the cyberattack on the company’s network that forced the shutdown of its gas pipeline infrastructure and gas shortages, two people familiar with the transaction told Blomberg News.
Colonial Pipeline paid the ransom amount using cryptocurrency within hours of the attack, highlighting the pressure the company faced to get gas flowing again to customers on the East Coast, according to Bloomberg.
This contradicts reports from earlier this week that the company had no plans of paying a fee to decrypt important data files and help get the gas pipeline up and running again.
The Georgia-based company appears to have paid the ransom in cryptocurrency just hours after Friday’s attack, Bloomberg reported Thursday.
Once the hackers received the ransom payment, they gave Colonial Pipeline a decrypting tool to get access to its data again and restore the broken network. The tool was so slow that the company continued using its own backups to help restore the system, one of the people familiar with the company’s efforts said, Bloomberg reported.
Colonial Pipeline was hit with a ransomware attack. Bloomberg reported that the hackers began their attack on Thursday by stealing about 100 gigabytes of data as part of a double extortion scheme. The company shut some of its operations to prevent the malicious software from spreading.
Both U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) discourage making payments to hackers.
“Paying a ransom may embolden adversaries to target additional organizations, encourage other criminal actors to engage in the distribution of ransomware, and/or may fund illicit activities,” CISA said in an alert Wednesday.
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