Sunday, May 09, 2021
Known group under suspicion
Hackers shut down the largest US pipeline
For the third time in the past few months, states have fallen victim to a cyber attack. Hackers are now paralyzing the largest oil pipeline in the United States. Experts suspect a highly professional criminal group behind it.
The largest oil pipeline in the US has been targeted by a hacker attack. The operating company announced that the operation of the colonial pipeline has been temporarily suspended. The cyber attack therefore affected part of the IT system. The entire system was then switched to offline mode.
The company did not provide any further details about the attack. A cybersecurity company was hired to investigate. In addition, the federal authorities were informed about the case.
As the FAZ reports, the hackers, according to a former government employee and two sources from the industry, are likely to be a highly professional criminal group. It will be investigated whether it is the group referred to by IT security companies as “DarkSide”. “DarkSide” is known for smuggling malicious programs and then blackmailing companies. The program encrypts company data. Only after paying a ransom will the data be made usable again.
USA repeatedly victim of cyber attacks
The Colonial Pipeline is the largest in the USA in terms of transported volume. Every day more than 2.5 million barrels (one barrel is 159 liters) of gasoline, diesel, kerosene and other petroleum products flow through the pipelines. The pipeline runs a good 8,800 kilometers from Houston in the state of Texas to New York and supplies around 50 million consumers.
The USA had been rocked by two massive cyber attacks in the past few months. An attack uncovered in December using software from US company SolarWinds affected thousands of government computers and private networks. The US blamed Russia for this.
In March, an attack on Microsoft’s Exchange email service, suspected by Chinese hackers, became public. At least 30,000 US organizations were reportedly affected.
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