Report: Ransonware Gang Behind Colonial Pipeline Hack Pocketed $90 Million in Bitcoin

According to a recent report, the hackers behind the shutdown of the Colonial Pipeline, which caused a gas shortage along the East Coast, received $90 million in bitcoin ransom payments from 47 victims over the past nine months.

CNBC reports that DarkSide, the hacker group behind the recent Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack, received a total of $90 million in Bitcoin ransom payments from 47 victims over the past nine months.

Brett Callow, a threat analyst at antivirus company Emsisoft, commented on the Colonial Pipeline attack and the decision to pay the ransom, stating: “I can’t say I’m surprised, but it’s certainly disappointing. Unfortunately, it’ll help keep United States critical infrastructure providers in the crosshairs. If a sector proves to be profitable, they’ll keep on hitting it.”

Morgan Wright, the Chief Security Advisor at SentinelOne and former Senior Advisor of the U.S. State Department and the Anti-Terrorism Assistance Program, appeared on Breitbart News Daily recently to speak with Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief and host of Breitbart News Daily, Alex Marlow. The key topic of the day was the rise in ransomware attacks and the recent cyber attack on the Colonial Pipeline.

Asking Wright about the Colonial Pipeline hack and what the establishment media may have missed about the situation, Wright stated: “Details are always hard to come by in these things, because it’s the fog of war basically as the investigation unrolls. We do know what publicly has been said but there are some things that we can figure out behind that as well. One is that definitely if they’re not in Russia, they’re definitely linked to Russia, these attackers, because they’re getting air cover from Vladamir Putin.”

The London-based blockchain analytics firm Elliptic stated that it had identified the Bitcoin wallet used by DarkSide to collect ransom payments from its victims. Security researchers at Intel 471 also said that DarkSide had closed down after losing access to its servers and its cryptocurrency wallets were emptied.

In a blog post, Elliptic stated that DarkSide and its affiliates had collected at least $90 million in Bitcoin ransom payments over the past nine months from 47 different victims. The average payment made to the group was around $1.9 million, according to Elliptic.

Tom Robinson Elliptic’s co-founder and chief scientist, commented: “To our knowledge, this analysis includes all payments made to DarkSide, however further transactions may yet be uncovered, and the figures here should be considered a lower bound.”

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