Welcome to DarkSide – and the inexorable rise of ransomware | John Naughton

Welcome to DarkSide – and the inexorable rise of ransomware | John Naughton

3 years ago
Anonymous $OlGJJXacOb

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/may/15/welcome-to-darkside-and-the-inexorable-rise-of-ransomware

The hacking of a US gas pipeline is proof that cybercrime is now a major industry – with its own trading markets and even CSR

On Friday 7 May, Colonial, the quaintly named operator of the pipeline that brings 45% of the US east coast’s gasoline and jet fuel from Texas to New York, announced that it had been hacked. My initial assumption was that this was Russian retaliation for the Biden administration’s punitive cyber-attacks on Russia in response to the SolarWinds hack. After all, if a pipeline like this isn’t “critical infrastructure”, what is? If so, were we not witnessing a significant escalation in information warfare between two nuclear-armed powers?

Welcome to DarkSide – and the inexorable rise of ransomware | John Naughton

May 15, 2021, 4:19pm UTC
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/may/15/welcome-to-darkside-and-the-inexorable-rise-of-ransomware > The hacking of a US gas pipeline is proof that cybercrime is now a major industry – with its own trading markets and even CSR > On Friday 7 May, Colonial, the quaintly named operator of the pipeline that brings 45% of the US east coast’s gasoline and jet fuel from Texas to New York, announced that it had been hacked. My initial assumption was that this was Russian retaliation for the Biden administration’s punitive cyber-attacks on Russia in response to the SolarWinds hack. After all, if a pipeline like this isn’t “critical infrastructure”, what is? If so, were we not witnessing a significant escalation in information warfare between two nuclear-armed powers?