With the US still reeling from what is being called the most disruptive cyberattack on record, thousands of gas stations continue to report outages, with President Joe Biden saying supplies should return to normal by the weekend.
While Colonial Pipelines, whose system linking refineries on the Gulf Coast got knocked offline after the “DarkSide” ransomware cyberattack infected it. As of writing, the group’s extortion website, which had demanded nearly $5 million in ransom, had gone offline though the cause is not yet publicly known.
Bloomberg News reported that Colonial had paid up the ransom in cryptocurrency, following which they received a decrypting tool to restore the downed IT network. However, the time to fix was so long that the company resorted to using its own backups.
The company on Saturday tweeted saying it had resumed normal operations since it initiated a restart of pipeline operations on Wednesday.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">As we previously reported, Colonial Pipeline initiated the restart of pipeline operations at approximately 5 p.m. ET on Wednesday, May 12. Since that time, we have returned the system to normal operations, delivering millions of gallons per hour to the markets we serve. <a href="https://t.co/UJG7SqUxSQ">pic.twitter.com/UJG7SqUxSQ</a></p>— Colonial Pipeline (@Colpipe) <a href="https://twitter.com/Colpipe/status/1393529174598504454?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 15, 2021</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
Following the US government’s threat to go after the Darkside Groupgroup, much of its infrastructure has reportedly been taken offline including a blog, payment services and servers. Funds from their payment servers have reportedly been withdrawn to an unknown address, teh group said.
At latest report, gas availability website said many states continued to face huge outages in supply, with US capital Washington D.C. leading at 86 per cent of stations reporting outages.
In a bid to tackle the losses, ships under emergency waivers moved fuel from U.S. Gulf Coast refiners to the northeast, while 18-wheel tanker trunks ferrying gasoline from Alabama to Virginia.
Colonial Pipeline wasn’t the only target of DarkSide, which had claimed to have hacked four other companies including a Toshiba subsidiary in Germany, a Brazilian battery firm, a Chicago-based tech company, and a British engineering firm.
