On Monday, American officials said that most of the multimillion dollars payment made to hackers had been retrieved after the cyberattack that halted the country’s dominant fuel pipeline earlier month.
The process to halt cryptocurrency sent to the hacker group is the 1st of its type to be given a task force set up by the US Justice Department. It projects a rare triumph against ransomware directed at American governmental and public institutions in a time when continued cyberattacks are threatening critical industries around the world.
In a news meeting announcing the working, Lisa Monaco (Deputy Attorney General) said that by going after the whole ecosystem that fuels ransomware and cyberattacks, including criminal earnings in the form of digital currency or cryptocurrency, they will continue to use all of their resources to boost the consequences and cost of ransomware and several other cyberattacks.
Company’s system went offline
Colonial regulators described that they set their company’s pipeline system offline ahead of the attack that could hit its operating system. After this, they soon planned to pay seventy-five bitcoins (then the cryptocurrency bitcoin valued at around 4.4 million dollars) in hopes of starting its operation back online ASAP. Moreover, this week, the firm’s chief executive and president, Joseph Blount, has decided to testify ahead of the congressional panels.
Source: Web
On Monday, in a statement, the president of the firm described that ‘he was thankful for the struggles made by FBI and also praised it for holding hackers accountable and disturbing their maneuvers’ is an excellent path to defend and daunt against upcoming cyber attacks of this kind.
He continued that the private sector even has an equally significant role to play, and they must continue to take cyber threats very severely and spent accordingly to strengthen their defenses.
The FBI’s Abbate described that the digital currency is preferred by criminals because it is an easy process and enables them to direct online money regardless of any physical location, but here, the investigation team, the FBI, was able to check a digital currency wallet that has been used by the hacker group and remained successful in recovering the payments from there.
He said that for financially motivated cybercriminals, mainly those allegedly located outside of the country, halting access to revenue is one of the highly effective consequences they can impose.
