Today's news cycle moves with all the slapstick, comedic speed of the Keystone Kops on meth, so you may have forgotten the infamous Colonial Pipeline hack, back in May.
This involved a sinister cyber gang called Barkside Darkside which took down America's largest oil pipeline in a ransomware attack. Pay us around 5 million bucks in Bitcoin, said the cryptic crims, and you get your pipeline back.
Sure enough, Colonial coughed up the crypto, and before you could say SPECTRE and CHAOS, this essential bit of American infrastructure was back up and running. Thank God for that, and yet another instance of those dastardly Kremlins messing with our great democracy.
Thank God our patriotic sleuths in the FBI were on the case and wasted no time recovering the bulk of the missing millions. Sorry, Putin, foiled again. But how did these latter day Sherlocks get the cash? Easy, they followed the money, which was publicly traceable to an online wallet on a server in California. Hey, fire up your laptop, find the transaction, the wallet address, and boom, go to court and get that cash. Which is what they did.
So. Are we really supposed to believe that Cyber Spetsnaz are so laughably stupid as to store their ill-gotten digital currency in an online wallet, in America? You know, when they could've spent $50 for its offline hardware equivalent? Who knows, maybe Russian hackerz are incredibly, ridiculously stupid.
Speaking of which, it seems Colonial's cyber security was pathetically rubbish. Who knows, maybe some 13 year olds broke in for a larf. Possible. Then again, perhaps we're looking at an equally rubbish false flag, or simply useless pipeline tech, which bodes ill for the future. Or, surely not, USGOV feels threatened by BTC because, you know, USD$ is so totally sound.
Check out Zero for the lighthearted story.
Cheerz,
LSP
I was talking to some unaware coworkers today ("Who is this Jen Psaki you're talking about?".
ReplyDeleteThe feds said it was a problem for Colonial to solve.
Then the bitcoin payoff is recovered. And the password (remember that guy who lost millions because he forgot his?) was "password".
So the feds got most of it back. Most of it?
I remember when the feds took down my drug ring and claimed they had recovered 5 million in drug money when we knew they took 10 million from us.
Of course, that may be a false memory implant from the CIA.
We need to start teaching kids this technical stuff or we're gonna get hacked day after day. Trump dropped the ball on getting our kids trained.
ReplyDeleteIn 1986, the Jerusalem Post reported "the Soviet secret police ... secured the release of three kidnaped Soviet diplomats in Beirut by castrating a relative of a radical Lebanese Shia Muslim leader, sending him the severed organs and then shooting the relative in the head." The same should be done to ransomware outlaws. Shutting down pipelines, airlines, banks and such is an act of war and should be treated as such.
ReplyDeleteIt's all so stupid.
ReplyDeleteWhat SgtBob said, but instead we find ourselves paying China to biologically attack us.
ReplyDeletePersonally, I support the death penalty for hacking of any kind, even the kind that screws up Aunt Margaret's computer for a day.
It's a curious thing, Ed. I understand the evil Russian hackerz took 11M$ from Colonial as an act of racial reparation.Then the Hoover building slueths took it back again coz it was so hard to find.
ReplyDeleteNothing to see here, move along.
Kid, the state of edukayshaun is something to behold. No thanks to Russia, which clearly hacked it.
ReplyDeleteI like your style, Sgt! Let's add rainbow heretics to the list.
ReplyDeleteLL, very. What a clownshow.
ReplyDeleteBut Kid, the more we pay China to attack us the richer we are! Said no Biden ever.
ReplyDelete