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Post by Admin on Jun 8, 2021 4:15:08 GMT
US recovers most of multimillion-dollar ransom payment made to Colonial Pipeline hackers
US investigators have recovered millions in cryptocurrency they say was paid in ransom to hackers whose attack prompted the shutdown of the key East Coast pipeline last month, the Justice Department announced Monday.
The announcement confirms CNN's earlier reporting about the FBI-led operation, which was carried out with cooperation from Colonial Pipeline, the company that fell victim to the ransomware attack in question.
Specifically, the Justice Department said it seized approximately $2.3 million in Bitcoins paid to individuals in a criminal hacking group known as DarkSide. The FBI said it has been investigating DarkSide, which is said to share its malware tools with other criminal hackers, for over a year.
The ransom recovery, which is the first seizure undertaken by the recently created DOJ digital extortion taskforce, is a rare outcome for a company that has fallen victim to a debilitating cyberattack in the booming criminal business of ransomware.
Colonial Pipeline Co. CEO Joseph Blount told The Wall Street Journal in an interview published last month that the company complied with the $4.4 million ransom demand because officials didn't know the extent of the intrusion by hackers and how long it would take to restore operations.
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Post by Admin on Jun 9, 2021 17:18:50 GMT
WATCH LIVE: House Homeland Security Committee holds hearing on cyber threats with Colonial Pipeline
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Post by Admin on Jun 13, 2021 6:03:57 GMT
The problem has long plagued bank robbers and drug smugglers: how to transport and hide huge sums of ill-gotten gains without getting caught? In the past few years, ransomware hackers have found an almost perfect solution — cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. It's fast. It's easy. Best of all, it's largely anonymous and hard to trace. In the latest example, the world's largest meat processor, JBS, announced Wednesday night that it recently paid $11 million in Bitcoin after a cyber attack forced the shutdown of its plants in the U.S., Canada and Australia. The FBI has blamed the attack on a Russian criminal gang. "You now have a possibility to move millions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency across national boundaries in seconds," said Yonatan Striem-Amit, a co-founder of Cybereason, a Boston-based company that offers protection from hackers. "It really is a very powerful tool in the hands of criminals to perform money laundering, to shift currency from one state to another in a way that's in a sense untraceable and definitely uncontrollable." Until recently, many cyber crimes involved the small-scale theft of individual credit cards or bank accounts. "If we were talking two years ago, we would not be talking about Bitcoin as being the dominant form of paying off ransom," said Hitesh Sheth, president of the cybersecurity company Vectra in San Jose, Calif. Big payments, little risk Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies made it possible to extort huge ransoms from large companies, hospitals and city governments. And if the cyber thieves live in countries like Russia — which many do — there's virtually no chance of getting caught. Ironically, cryptocurrency exchanges take place on what are called "public ledgers." This means anybody can observe online. But the parties in a transaction are anonymous, disguised with a random number.
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