After last month’s ransomware attack on the largest fuel pipeline in the US, owned by Colonial Pipeline, the US has recovered approximately $2.3 million (in the form of 63.7 bitcoins) of the $4.4 million ransom paid to the cyber-criminals responsible for the breach.
“Ransom payments are the fuel that propels the digital extortion engine, and [this] announcement demonstrates that the United States will use all available tools to make these attacks more costly and less profitable for criminal enterprises,” said Deputy Attorney General Lisa O. Monaco of the US Department of Justice (DoJ). “We will continue to target the entire ransomware ecosystem to disrupt and deter these attacks.”
The US DoJ revealed in a press release that by reviewing the bitcoin public ledger, “law enforcement was able to track multiple transfers of bitcoin and indentify that approximately 63.7 bitcoins, representing the proceeds of the victim’s ransom payment, had been transferred to a specific address.”
“Everyone wants to see ransomware hackers defeated, so it’s great to see that most of the ransom paid by Colonial Pipeline has been recovered,” said Peter Grimmond, international CTO and VP of technical sales at Veritas Technologies. “It is important that businesses now prepare for hackers to evolve their strategies in response because, while we may have won the battle, there’s a whole lot more to come in the war on ransomware.”
This is the first successful response to ransomware for the recently-created Department of Justice digital extortion taskforce. The attack took the pipeline offline and forced the US Government to introduce emergency legislation in response.
“Businesses should be acting now to ensure that they’re ready for this by backing up their data, scanning their networks and deploying strong encryption,” Grimmond said. “Ransomware has long been regarded as a cat-and-mouse game where hackers and businesses are constantly striving to outdo each other. In the case of Colonial, it seems like the cat has won, but there are plenty more mice out there! We all need to be two steps ahead to succeed.”
