Colonial Pipeline’s DarkSide Intrusion
The Colonial Pipeline attack is likely the most important cyberattacks of the year so far—both for its ability to show the devastating potential of cybercrime and for the robust federal response it inspired. It also showed our country is still completely and utterly addicted to oil and will be for the foreseeable future.
In May, hackers affiliated with the ransomware gang DarkSide managed to get inside the network of Colonial Pipeline, one of America’s largest oil and gas companies. By temporarily halting the pipeline’s operations, the attack not only spurred a short-lived energy crisis throughout the Southeast—the likes of which devolved into a panicked melee at gas stations in multiple states—it also fundamentally shifted how the federal government approaches cyberattacks of this nature. Following the attack, the FBI managed to trace and seize a significant portion of the cryptocurrency ransom payment that Colonial made to the hackers—a somewhat unprecedented development. At the same time, the event helped to catalyze an accelerating government initiative to crack down on cybercriminals, including a new ransomware task force put together by the Justice Department and other defensive policies put out by the Biden administration.
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