Gas prices are still steadily increasing as Colonial Pipeline recovers from the ransomware attack that hit earlier this month. The FBI has confirmed that the pipeline was compromised by DarkSide, a ransomware operation that states that they only target companies that can pay the specified ransom as they do not “want to kill your business”

What’s also nice of them is that they have a list of “principles” where they won’t attack hospitals, schools, non-profit orgs and the government (but who knows how true this is).

Colonial pipeline however, provides approximately 45% of the fuel for the east coast. On May 19th, Joseph Blount (CEO of Colonial Pipeline) announced that he had made the decision to pay a $4.4 million in bitcoin to try to get their systems back online.

According to President Biden, there is evidence that the ransomware operation is in Russia as there haven’t been attacks surfaced on Russian, Kazakh, and Ukrainian-speaking companies as reported by Reuters.

Is panic buying gas a good idea?

There have been images circulating of people buying gas and putting them in plastic bags in the back of their car (not sure how true this is but nonetheless scary images)… please don’t do this as it isn’t safe, it causes more shortages, and is a huge fire risk. Reminds me of the panic buying for toilet paper when COVID first hit.

sources: npr, bleepingcomputer, WSJ, Reuters