The company that operates the Colonial Pipeline, the largest US oil pipeline, paid a ransom of nearly $ 5 million to Russian-born hackers behind the cyber attack that forced the company to shut down the infrastructure. Bloomberg reports this on his website. A news that contrasts with those of recent days according to which the company had no intention of paying to restore operation of the pipeline.
The company, again according to the Bloomberg agency, paid the ransom in cryptocurrency (therefore untraceable) in the hours following the attack, a circumstance that highlights the immense pressure suffered by the operator to guarantee the flow of fuel for the cars and planes along the East coast, the most populated.
Once the money was received, the hackers provided the company with the IT tools to restore its computer network. But the tools were so slow that Colonial Pipeline continued to use its backups to restore the system.