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
