More Exact Colonial Pipeline Hack Details

It is prudent to review several sources for the real evidence and details and most often non-government companies are the ‘go-to’ places for that. Government spins stuff but private cyber experts offer up great context and such is the case below.

FBI Confirms Darkside Behind Colonial Pipeline Ransomware ... source

As a primer, CISA is a government agency launched by the Trump administration for all the right reasons.

Alert (AA20-049A)

Ransomware Impacting Pipeline Operations

But read on.

The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has issued an Alert that offers a set of best practices to protect against ransomware-induced business disruptions. The Alert was prompted by the attack against Colonial Pipeline, and it includes in its introductory section the preliminary conclusion that DarkSide ransomware affected Colonial’s IT systems only, and had no direct effect on the company’s OT networks. The best practices CISA advocates are familiar. The Alert closes with a statement strongly discouraging any victim from paying the ransom their attackers demand: “Paying a ransom may embolden adversaries to target additional organizations, encourage other criminal actors to engage in the distribution of ransomware, and/or may fund illicit activities. Paying the ransom also does not guarantee that a victim’s files will be recovered.”

FireEye yesterday published a report on DarkSide that emphasizes the group’s ransomware-as-a-service model. It’s a selective operation (criminal applicants for affiliate status are, for example, interviewed before being given access to DarkSide’s control panel) but it’s also not a monolithic one. FireEye’s Mandiant unit currently tracks five “clusters” of DarkSide threat activity. The affiliate model DarkSide uses shares criminal profits: “Affiliates retain a percentage of the ransom fee from each victim. Based on forum advertisements, this percentage starts at 25 percent for ransom fees less than $500,000 USD and decreases to 10 percent for ransom fees greater than $5M USD.”

Colonial Pipeline’s website came back online late yesterday, newly armored with a reCAPTCHA landing page. The company published an update in which it reported progress toward resumption of refined petroleum deliveries, with some 967,000 barrels delivered to Atlanta, Belton and Spartanburg in South Carolina, Charlotte and Greensboro in North Carolina, Baltimore, and Woodbury and Linden (close to the Port of New York and New Jersey). Some lines have been operated under manual control since Monday, at least, and have been moving existing inventory. As the company prepares to restart deliveries, they’ve taken delivery of an additional two million barrels, which they’ll ship once service is restored.

The company appears also to be addressing some concerns about its pipelines’ physical security, having “increased aerial patrols of our pipeline right of way and deployed more than 50 personnel to walk and drive ~ 5,000 miles of pipeline each day.” (hat tip to CyberWire)

Related reading:

Colonial Pipeline using vulnerable, outdated version of Microsoft Exchange: report
Pipeline operators were warned about potential attacks in 2020

“Energy Sector…developed the 2011 Roadmap to Achieve Energy Delivery Systems Cybersecurity…sector’s vision that “by 2020, resilient energy delivery systems are designed, installed, operated, and maintained to survive a cyber-incident while sustaining critical functions…”

 

A Chinese Freeze Dried Virus Part of Warfare?

“The PLA is engaging in irregular warfare today,” the West Point paper asserts. “China is employing lawfare to achieve strategic aims. The maritime militia is enforcing China’s sovereignty claims in the East and South China Seas against US partners and allies.”

And it has already weaponised international information flows and channels of influence, along with cyber, economic – and psychological – tactics. Source

Primer: Chinese scientists have been preparing for a Third World War fought with biological and genetic weapons including coronavirus for the last six years, according to a document obtained by US investigators.

The bombshell paper, accessed by the US State Department, insists they will be ‘the core weapon for victory’ in such a conflict, even outlining the perfect conditions to release a bioweapon, and documenting the impact it would have on ‘the enemy’s medical system’.

This latest evidence that Beijing considered the military potential of SARS coronaviruses from as early as 2015 has also raised fresh fears over the cause of Covid-19, with some officials still believing the virus could have escaped from a Chinese lab.

***

Before Covid-19, did we actually know who Anthony Fauci was and what he is about? Since 1984, he has been the Director of NIAID. His portfolio says is complete with prevention, diagnosis and treatment(s) of infectious diseases. Remember the Ebola crisis? Did we hear his name back then and did the Obama administration hire Fauci for guidance on the Ebola outbreak? Nah. What about Zika? Remember that one? Still we did not hear from Dr. Fauci. According to his professional profile, Fauci advised and served seven presidents. Really? Did Dr. Fauci even advise presidents on all things pandemic, virus or risks from Wuhan? If so….where is the evidence?

According to the National Institute of Health website going back to 2018, there is a profound ‘Serological Evidence of Bat SARS-Related Coronavirus Infections in Humans, China dissertation complete with references and footnotes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notice this is a partial screen shot in case it gets deleted by NIH. But note the dates in the summary. Further in the summary –> We conducted a virus neutralization test for the six positive samples targeting two SARSr-CoVs, WIV1 and WIV16 (Ge et al. ; Yang et al. ). None of them were able to neutralize either virus. These sera also failed to react by Western blot with any of the recombinant RBD proteins from SARS-CoV or the three bat SARSr-CoVs Rp3, WIV1, and SHC014. We also performed viral nucleic acid detection in oral and fecal swabs and blood cells, and none of these were positive.

Further in the study is this notation:

Acknowledgements

This study was jointly funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China Grant (81290341) to ZLS; the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases of the National Institutes of Health (Award Number R01AI110964) to PD and ZLS, United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Emerging Pandemic Threats PREDICT project Grant (Cooperative Agreement No. AID-OAA-A-14-00102) to PD; and Singapore NRF-CRP Grant (NRF2012NRF-CRP001–056) and CD-PHRG Grant (CDPHRG/0006/2014) to LFW.

We have some harder questions to ask of Dr. Fauci and a few other U.S. agencies…right? YES.

So, back to the paper originally released by the Australian and the DailyMail:

The authors of the document insist that a third world war ‘will be biological’, unlike the first two wars which were described as chemical and nuclear respectively.

Referencing research which suggested the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan forced them to surrender, and bringing about the end of WWII, they claim bioweapons will be ‘the core weapon for victory’ in a third world war.

The document also outlines the ideal conditions to release a bioweapon and cause maximum damage.

The scientists say such attacks should not be carried out in the middle of a clear day, as intense sunlight can damage the pathogens, while rain or snow can affect the aerosol particles.

Instead, it should be released at night, or at dawn, dusk, or under cloudy weather, with ‘a stable wind direction…so that the aerosol can float into the target area’.

Meanwhile, the research also notes that such an attack would result in a surge of patients requiring hospital treatment, which then ‘could cause the enemy’s medical system to collapse’.

Other concerns include China’s ‘Gain of Function’ research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology – near where the first Covid outbreak was discovered – at which virologists are creating new viruses said to be more transmissible and more lethal.

MP Tom Tugendhat, chairman of the foreign affairs committee, said: ‘This document raises major concerns about the ambitions of some of those who advise the top party leadership. Even under the tightest controls these weapons are dangerous.’

Chemical weapons expert Hamish de Bretton-Gordon said: ‘China has thwarted all attempts to regulate and police its laboratories where such experimentation may have taken place.’

The revelation from the book What Really Happened in Wuhan was reported yesterday.

The document, New Species of Man-Made Viruses as Genetic Bioweapons, says: ‘Following developments in other scientific fields, there have been major advances in the delivery of biological agents.

‘For example, the new-found ability to freeze-dry micro-organisms has made it possible to store biological agents and aerosolise them during attacks.’

It has 18 authors who were working at ‘high-risk’ labs, analysts say.

Australian Strategic Policy ­Institute executive director Peter Jennings also raised concerns over China’s biological research into coronaviruses potentially being weaponised in future.

Additionally in the article :

Only this week, Brazil President Jair Bolsonaro appeared to strongly criticise China by accusing it of creating Covid to spark a chemical ‘warfare.’

The comments were made during a press conference on Wednesday as the hardline leader sought to further distance himself from the growing attacks over his domestic handling of a pandemic that has produced the second-highest death toll in the world.

‘It’s a new virus. Nobody knows whether it was born in a laboratory or because a human ate some animal they shouldn’t have,’ Bolsonaro said.

‘But it is there. The military knows what chemical, bacteriological and radiological warfare. Are we not facing a new war? Which country has grown its GDP the most? I will not tell you.’

Since we can no longer get reliable information from our current government officials, perhaps we should ask Brazil or Australia, right?

Scientists studying bat diseases at China‘s maximum-security laboratory in Wuhan were engaged in a massive project to investigate animal viruses alongside leading military officials – despite their denials of any such links.

Documents obtained by The Mail on Sunday reveal that a nationwide scheme, directed by a leading state body, was launched nine years ago to discover new viruses and detect the ‘dark matter’ of biology involved in spreading diseases.

One leading Chinese scientist, who published the first genetic sequence of the Covid-19 virus in January last year, found 143 new diseases in the first three years of the project alone.

The fact that such a virus-detection project is led by both civilian and military scientists appears to confirm incendiary claims from the United States alleging collaboration between the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and the country’s 2.1 million-strong armed forces. Continue reading in full here.

What does Canada know?

National Microbiology Lab in Winnipeg gets $5M to expand ...

In part:

In July 2019, a rare event occurred in Canada, whereby a group of Chinese virologists were forcibly dispatched from the Canadian National Microbiology Laboratory (NML) in Winnipeg, a facility they worked in, running parts of the Special Pathogen Programme of Canada’s Public Health Agency.1 Experimental infections – including aerogenic ones – of monkeys with the most lethal viruses found on Planet Earth comprise nearly a routine therein. Four months earlier, a shipment of two exceptionally virulent viruses dealt with in the NML – Ebola and Nipah viruses – was on its way from NML, ended in China, and has thereafter been traced and regarded to be improper, specifically put as “possible policy breaches”, or rather but an “administrative issue”, ostensibly.2

Yet the scope of this incident is much wider, in actuality. The main culprit seems to be Dr. Xiangguo Qiu, an outstanding Chinese scientist, born in Tianjin. Heading until recently the Vaccine Development and Antiviral Therapies section of the Special Pathogens Programme, she primarily received her medical doctor degree from Hebei Medical University in China in 1985 and came to Canada for graduate studies in 1996.3 Later on, she was affiliated with the Institute of Cell Biology and the Department of Pediatrics and Child Health of the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, not engaged with studying pathogens.4 But a shift took place, somehow. Since 2006,5 she has been studying powerful viruses, Ebola virus foremost, in the NML. The two viruses shipped from the NML to China – Ebola and Nipah – were studied by her in 2014, for instance (together with the viruses Machupo, Junin, Rift Valley Fever, Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever and Hendra).6 Yet utmost attention has been paid to Ebola, with the highly legitimate aim of developing effective prophylaxis and treatment for infected people. Inevitably, her works included a variety of Ebola wild strains – among them the most virulent one, with 80% lethality rate – and much relied on experimental infections of monkeys, including via the airways.7 Remarkable achievements were attained, indeed, and Dr. Qiu accepted the Governor General’s Innovation Award in 2018. More here.

Even media in India is asking for the same transparency on the Canadian component:

Source: China has been a signatory to the Biological Weapons Convention since 1984, and has repeatedly insisted it is abiding by the treaty that bans developing bio-weapons.

But suspicions have persisted, with the U.S. State Department and other agencies stating publicly as recently as 2009 that they believe China has offensive biological agents.

Though no details have appeared in the open literature, China is “commonly considered to have an active biological warfare program,” says the Federation of American Scientists. An official with the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Chemical Defence charged last month China is the world leader in toxin “threats.”

In a 2015 academic paper, Shoham – of Bar-Ilan’s Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies – asserts that more than 40 Chinese facilities are involved in bio-weapon production.

China’s Academy of Military Medical Sciences actually developed an Ebola drug – called JK-05 — but little has been divulged about it or the defence facility’s possession of the virus, prompting speculation its Ebola cells are part of China’s bio-warfare arsenal, Shoham told the National Post.

Meet the Pentagon’s New Hatchet Man

On a personal note…about two months ago, I received a text message from an active officer in the military and it pointed to exactly what you’re about to read below. The text had the very words ‘stand-down’ in it.

It is no wonder retirement papers are being filed in huge volumes….but read on and be informed. No one on the payroll at the Pentagon should be doing anything other than ensuring combat readiness and confirming intelligence….but not so much.

After graduating from West Point, among other national security assignments, Bishop Garrison served as Deputy Foreign Policy Adviser on the Presidential campaign of Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton. Further background details are here.

On February 3, 2021, in the wake of the “deadly events” of 1/6, Biden’s new Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin ordered a 60-day stand-down and total purge of the U.S. military’s rampant, undefined “extremism” problem. Though the details of this purge were always kept vague and framed in apolitical terms, it was immediately obvious the target would be MAGA — with the buzzword “extremism” tagged onto various proxies for Trump supporters, conservatives, and opponents of globalism of all stripes.

We now know the hatchet man the Pentagon has selected to carry out this MAGA purge of the American defense forces, and the entire operation is worse than you could have ever imagined.

The Biden administration has just put the equivalent of Ibram X. Kendi in charge of vetting the entire U.S. military.

This hatchet man’s name is Bishop Garrison, Senior Advisor to the Secretary of Defense for Diversity and Inclusion.

In a tweet thread from July 27, 2019, Bishop Garrison wrote:

This isn’t just some random case of Trump Derangement Syndrome on Twitter.

As the new head of the U.S. military’s “Countering Extremism” task force, this critical race theory loving, Trump Derangement Syndrome suffering, fake news spreading, 100% partisan hack is the man who will now separate permissible “opinion” from purgeable “extremism” at the Pentagon, which is the nation’s largest employer, overseeing 2.9 million personnel.

Just as the Defense Secretary’s 60 day stand down to take stock of “extremism” within the military’s ranks expired, the Pentagon issued a formal memo on April 9th describing its “Immediate Actions to Counter Extremism.” This memo establishes the Countering Extremism Working Group (“CEWG”) to develop and implement all “Counter Extremism” policies at the Pentagon.

Bishop Garrison is at the helm.

From the memo:

The [CEWG’s] immediate actions are as follows:

  • Review and Update of DODI 1325.06 Extremism Definition: Office of the Secretary of Defense (Personnel & Readiness) and the Office of the General Counsel (OGC) will review and update DODI 1325.06 to more specifically define what constitutes extremist behavior.
  • Updating the Service Member Transition Checklist: The military departments will add provisions to their service member transition checklists that include training on potential targeting of service members by extremist groups and work with other federal departments agencies to create a mechanism by which veterans have the opportunity to report any potential contact with an extremist group should they choose to do so.
  • Review and Standardization of Screening Questionnaires: All military departments to update and standardize screening questionnaires to solicit specific information about current or previous extremist behavior.
  • Commission of Extremism Study: The Department will commission a study on extremist behavior within our Total Force, to include gaining greater fidelity on the scope of the problem.

Led by Bishop Garrison, Senior Advisor to the Secretary of Defense on Human Capital and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, the CEWG will oversee the implementation of immediate actions as well as the development of mid-term and long-term recommendations for the continued engagement of this issue. The CEWG will report through the Workforce Management Group (WMG) to the Deputy’s Workforce Council (DWC). [U.S. Department of Defense]

From the above, we learn that Bishop Garrison will lead the CEWG, which will function as a de facto “Opinion Police” for Pentagon personnel on a permanent, go-forward basis.

The CEWG’s first tasks will be: to change the Pentagon’s definition of “extremism”; to stop Pentagon personnel from being recruited by “extremist” groups; and to beef up personnel screening to better detect hidden “extremist beliefs.”

If you’re in the military, it appears that Bishop Garrison’s CEWG will scour your Internet history, making sure to target “gray areas, such as reading, following and liking extremist material and content in social media forums and platforms.”

But what exactly are “extremist beliefs” and “extremist materials”?

A leaked 17-page DARPA memo from March 27, 2021 entitled “Extremism and Insider Threat in the DoD” provides a clue as to what new categories of lawful thoughts, associations and reading materials are likely to be scanned and banned by Bishop Garrison’s CEWG. DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency colloquially known as “The Pentagon’s Brain,” recommended a brand new category called “Patriot Extremism,” which occurs when a citizen believes “the US government has become corrupt” or “has overstepped its constitutional boundaries”:

“Patriot Extremism” is completely distinct from “White supremacy,” which DARPA maintains as a wholly separate category. To DARPA’s credit, they did at least add a new category for “Anarchist Extremism,” which purports to target some degree of left-wing political organization. But DARPA’s “Symbols of Extremism” collage on page 6 clearly reveals their intended target: the collage includes 12 “far-right” symbols, versus just two Antifa symbols, and just one for ISIS. “Extremist” “far-right” symbols include Pepe the Frog, the OK hand gesture, “Come and Take It” guns-rights memes, and the “Q” in QAnon:

So now it’s up to Bishop Garrison’s CEWG to take DARPA’s “extremism” proposals and either implement them, throw them in the trash, or come up with something new.

We already have a good idea of Bishop Garrison’s views from the egregious anti-Trump tweets presented above.

But since Bishop Garrison will effectively be the vetter-in-chief responsible for culling the entire U.S. military of any potential “extremist” in its ranks, it’s only fair that Bishop Garrison’s own “extremist” Internet footprint be more thoroughly exposed — and with it the entire sham of his dangerous project to politicize and purge America’s defense forces.

The Critical Race Theory Zealot

Bishop Garrison is an ardent advocate of the so-called “1619 Project.” In August 2019, he instructed his followers to stop whatever they were doing and read 1619‘s 100-page spread in the Sunday Times immediately.

Recall that the “1619” in the 1619 Project refers to the year in which the first slaves arrived at the British Colonies. Spearheaded by the New York Times’s Nikole Hannah Jones, the idea of the 1619 Project is to replace 1776 with 1619 as the year of America’s founding, with a view toward casting the U.S. as fundamentally evil and unjust. The New York Post explains “How the 1619 Project Slandered America”:

In the absence of traditional public examinations this time of year, as a result of you know what, here’s a little history quiz for you. What year marked the creation of the United States?

Most of you will probably answer 1776, the year of the Declaration of Independence. Credit might also be given if you said 1788, the date of the ratification of the Constitution.

You’d all be wrong. The correct date, apparently, is 1619.

This was the year the first slaves arrived in the British colonies of North America, and if the people who control most of the cultural conversation in America these days get their way, we should all see this as the true moment of the founding of the nation. The point, of course, is that it defines America as a nation built not on the lofty ideals of freedom and self-government laid out in the document written by the Founding Fathers, but as one built on the degradation, dehumanization and persecution of black people. [NY Post]

The 1619 Project is not simply critical of certain aspects of American history. Rather, it recasts and redefines America as fundamentally evil, and is therefore anti-American in this most direct and literal sense. The 1619 agenda is so controversial that Republicans in 5 states sought to ban schools from incorporating its anti-American poison in their curricula. Even Mitch McConnell, hardly the brave culture warrior, piped up to address the 1619 Project’s anti-American slander.

So vicious and subversive is the 1619 Project’s slander of America that one of Donald Trump’s last actions as President was to set up a 1776 Commission dedicated to correcting its damaging lies about what America fundamentally is. Of course, Biden made sure to do away with this just days after taking office.

As a final confirmation of the anti-white, anti-American agenda behind the 1619 Project, its founder Nikole Hannah-Jones was revealed to have referred to the “white race” as “bloodsuckers” and “barbaric devils,” and Christopher Columbus as “no different than Hitler.”

Such is the nature of the 1619 Project that Bishop Garrison, ideological vetter-in-chief for the United States military, promoted so enthusiastically as “stories we all need to hear.”

The most generous and willfully blind might write off Bishop Garrison’s promotion of the 1619 Project as an extraneous interest that wouldn’t have an effect on his current definition of “extremism” or on his present role in vetting extremism from the U.S. Armed Forces. Think again.

In an August 2019 screed entitled “Racism is an existential threat“, Bishop Garrison directly connects his support for the 1619 Project to his conception of “white nationalist extremism” as the pre-eminent security threat facing the United States:

The country’s horrific history on race and its continued refusal to engage these problems head-on has exacerbated the issue to the point of a violent crisis. This crisis continues to seep into our state and local domestic policies, our technologies, the algorithms of social media companies, and (potentially) our future like a corrosive poison contaminating a water table. We will continue to face the nation-ending threat of white supremacy and white nationalist extremism unless we invest in Combating Violent Extremism (CVE) programs, which this administration has cut, and find the courage to have honest-to-God difficult, uncomfortable conversations in our homes and communities about our history of race and privilege in America and how it has shaped our lives today.

If you can stand it, read on here….the details uncovered are extraordinary and without dispute.

Shame on Disney

Hat tip to Christopher Rufo for his tireless work and investigations including obtaining tangible real evidence.

Sad Dumbo photo

In part:

The Walt Disney Corporation famously bills its amusement parks as “the happiest place on Earth,” but inside the company’s headquarters in Burbank, California, a conflict is brewing. In the past year, Disney executives have elevated the ideology of critical race theory into a new corporate dogma, bombarded employees with trainings on “systemic racism,” “white privilege,” “white fragility,” and “white saviors,” and launched racially segregated “affinity groups” at the company’s headquarters.

I have obtained a trove of whistleblower documents related to Disney’s “diversity and inclusion” program, called “Reimagine Tomorrow,” which paints a disturbing picture of the company’s embrace of racial politics. Multiple Disney employees, who requested anonymity out of fear of reprisals, told me that the Reimagine Tomorrow program, though perhaps noble in intent, has become deeply politicized and engulfed parts of the company in racial conflict.

The core of Disney’s racial program is a series of training modules on “antiracism.” In one, called “Allyship for Race Consciousness,” the company tells employees that they must “take ownership of educating [themselves] about structural anti-Black racism” and that they should “not rely on [their] Black colleagues to educate [them],” because it is “emotionally taxing.” The United States, the document claims, has a “long history of systemic racism and transphobia,” and white employees, in particular, must “work through feelings of guilt, shame, and defensiveness to understand what is beneath them and what needs to be healed.” Disney recommends that employees atone by “challeng[ing] colorblind ideologies and rhetoric” such as “All Lives Matter” and “I don’t see color”; they must “listen with empathy [to] Black colleagues” and must “not question or debate Black colleagues’ lived experience.”

In another module, called “What Can I Do About Racism?,” Disney tells employees that they should reject “equality,” with a focus on “equal treatment and access to opportunities,” and instead strive for “equity,” with a focus on “the equality of outcome.” The training also includes a series of lessons on “implicit biases,” “microaggressions,” and “becoming an antiracist.” The company tells employees that they must “reflect” on America’s “racist infrastructure” and “think carefully about whether or not your wealth, income, treatment by the criminal justice system, employment, access to housing, health care, political power, and education might be different if you were of a different race.”

In order to put these ideas into action, Disney sponsored the creation of the “21-Day Racial Equity and Social Justice Challenge” in partnership with the YWCA and included the program in its recommended resources for employees. The challenge begins with information on “systemic racism” and asks participants to accept that they have “all been raised in a society that elevates white culture over others.” Participants then learn about their “white privilege” and are asked to fill out a white privilege “checklist,” with options including: “I am white,” I am heterosexual,” “I am a man,” “I still identity as the gender I was born in,” “I have never been raped,” “I don’t rely on public transportation,” and “I have never been called a terrorist.” The full summary is here.

Likely after hiring a crisis management firm to review and respond….here is the statement Disney published.

Image

Christopher Rufo is not buying it –>

Christopher F. Rufo
@realchrisrufo
Disney has released a statement claiming that my reporting “distorted” their antiracism program. This is false. I published direct quotations, contextual screenshots, and the original source documents in their entirety. Disney is distorting the truth—and I won’t stand for it.
Disney’s premise has always been to provide an escape for middle Americans, but its executives seem to harbor growing contempt for the very people who visit their amusement parks, watch their films, and buy their merchandise. Once known as the “Happiest Place on Earth,” Disney has now committed to becoming the “wokest place on Earth”—whatever the cost.

 

 

The Harbinger of the Colonial Pipeline Ransomware

The harbinger is what protections against hacks and ransomware are underway? Stopping oil and gas flow and delivery is how to stop life and economies. Apply some critical thinking here…it goes way beyond cost as supply is crucial. If the FBI was well aware of the DarkSide in 2020….we need to rethink the Bureau completely.

PC Magazine provides this update in part:

The FBI today confirmed that the cyberattack that forced Colonial Pipeline to take its network offline over the weekend is due to ransomware known as DarkSide.

“The FBI confirms that the DarkSide ransomware is responsible for the compromise of the Colonial Pipeline networks,” the agency says. “We continue to work with the company and our government partners on the investigation.”

During a Monday White House press briefing, Anne Neuberger, Deputy National Security Advisor for Cyber and Emerging Technology, said the FBI has been investigating the DarkSide variant since October 2020, and has determined that it’s a ransomware-as-a-service attack, meaning “criminal affiliates conduct attacks and then share the proceeds with ransomware developers,” she said.

Though news reports have tied DarkSide to Russian operatives, President Biden said Monday that “so far, there’s no evidence…from our intelligence people that Russia is involved, although there is evidence that the actors [behind the ransomware are] in Russia, [so] they have some responsibility to deal with this.”

Colonial Pipeline cyberattack shuts down pipeline that ...

The Chicago Tribune along with other media sources post the notion that this should not last long:

The operator of a major U.S. pipeline hit by a cyberattack said Monday it hopes to have service mostly restored by the end of the week.

Colonial Pipeline offered the update after revealing that it had halted operations because of a ransomware attack the FBI has linked to a criminal gang.

The ransomware attack on the pipeline, which the company says delivers roughly 45% of fuel consumed on the U.S. East Coast, raised concerns that supplies of gasoline, jet fuel and diesel could be disrupted in parts of the region if the disruption continues.

At the moment, though, officials said there is no fuel shortage.

The Colonial Pipeline transports gasoline and other fuel through 10 states between Texas and New Jersey, according to the company.

Colonial is in the process of restarting portions of its network. It said Sunday that its main pipeline remained offline, but that some smaller lines were operational. The company has not said when it would completely restart the pipeline.

“The time of the outage is now approaching critical levels and if it continues to remain down we do expect an increase in East Coast gasoline and diesel prices,” said Debnil Chowdhury, IHS Markit Executive Director. The last time there was an outage of this magnitude was in 2016, he said, when gas prices rose 15 to 20 cents per gallon. But the Northeast had significantly more local refining capacity at that time, potentially intensifying any impact.

The FBI and others got the attribution right on this one and did so very quickly.

The group behind the ransomware that took down Colonial Pipeline late last week has apologized for the “social consequences,” claiming that its goal is to make money, not cause societal problems.

According to Vice, the group’s apology was posted to its dark web site. It reads:

We are apolitical, we do not participate in geopolitics, do not need to tie us with a defined government and look for other our motives.

Our goal is to make money and not creating problems for society.

From today, we introduce moderation and check each company that our partners want to encrypt to avoid social consequences in the future.

According to NYT cybersecurity reporter Nicole Perlroth, DarkSide isn’t necessarily associated with a specific nationstate, but it does tend to avoid holding victims for ransom if their systems are running in certain Russian and Eastern European languages (see embedded tweet below). Bloomberg reports that the group is known to speak Russian.

Source:

Imagine the other worldwide pipeline systems and their respective responses such as all of Europe.

Natural gas pipelines of Europe and surrounding regions ...