Daily Mail,

14 May, 2021

The Russian hackers behind the Colonial Pipeline attack now claim they are shutting down after getting a $5 million ransom – as nearly 90 percent of Washington DC’s gas stations ran out of fuel and the national average price climbed to $3.04 a gallon.  

The US capital almost ran out of gasoline on Friday despite the country’s largest fuel pipeline reopening and ramping up deliveries in the wake of the cyberattack that shut down the system for six days. 

DarkSide, the Russian-based group responsible for crippling the pipeline, has now claimed they’ve shut down amid pressure from the US government and probing from law enforcement. 

The cyber gang sent a message to partners overnight, according to cyber experts, claiming they had lost access to servers used for its web blog and to a cryptocurrency account it uses to pay affiliates in the wake of the Colonial attack. 

‘Servers were seized, money of advertisers and founders was transferred to an unknown account,’ the message read.  

President Biden on Thursday vowed the US would take measures to disrupt the ability of cyber criminal groups. It is not clear if the US government played any role in the disruption of DarkSide’s activity. 

It also wasn’t clear if DarkSide’s disruption was legitimate, given cybersecurity experts believe it might just be a ploy to disappear from public view after receiving the $5 million ransom. They say it’s possible the group may just reform under a different name, which is common in cyber criminal gangs.  

The Colonial Pipeline shutdown has proven to be the most disruptive cyberattack on record as Washington officials assured motorists that supplies would return to normal soon.

Even so, widespread panic buying is still ongoing, which has left filling stations across the Southeast out of gas – even in areas far from the pipeline.  

The average national gasoline price climbed to almost $3.04 on Friday, which the most expensive since October 2014, according to the American Automobile Association. 

On Friday gas station outages in Washington, DC, climbed to 87 percent, up from 79 percent the day before, tracking firm GasBuddy said. 

President Joe Biden assured motorists supplies should start returning to normal by this weekend.

‘Most of these states/areas with outages have continued to see panicked buying, which is likely a contributing factor to the slow-ish recovery thus far,’ said GasBuddy’s Patrick De Haan. 

‘It will take a few weeks.’

Colonial Pipeline announced late Thursday it had restarted its entire pipeline system linking refineries on the Gulf Coast to markets along the eastern seaboard.

Colonial warned it would take ‘several days’ to return to normal and some areas may experience ‘intermittent service interruptions during this start-up period’. 

Some states experienced modest improvements by Friday but still had a lot of gasoline outages. 

About 70 percent of gas stations in North Carolina were without fuel, with outages in around 50 percent of stations in Virginia, South Carolina and Georgia.

‘Our current expectation based on the conversations between the company and experts at the Department of Energy is that the vast majority of markets and affected regions are receiving fuel at gas stations for consumers, and will continue to receive more fuel throughout the weekend and into early next week,’ White House press secretary Jen Psaki said on Friday. 

‘Hence, getting us closer to return us back to normal.’  

In Washington, DC, Dennis Li was stuck on Friday at a Sunoco gas station that was out of fuel. 

He had tried to find gas at four stations during the day but had no luck.

‘I’m running on empty to the point where I don’t want to drive anymore,’ said Li, who is from Annapolis, Maryland. 

‘I canceled my plans for today and this weekend because I didn’t realize shortages were so severe.’ 

A gas station owner in Virginia said panic buying is the problem.

‘It’s like a frenzy,’ Barry Rieger, who owns a gas station in Burke, Virginia, told WJLA-TV. 

Many authorities are warning of the dangers of hoarding gas. 

In South Carolina, a woman was severely burned after flipping a car that a deputy tried to pull over for a suspected stolen license plate Thursday night. The fire touched off multiple explosions due to fuel ‘that she was hoarding in the trunk of the vehicle,’ a Pickens County sheriff’s statement said.

In Florida, a 2004 Hummer was destroyed by fire on Wednesday shortly after the driver had filled up four 5-gallon gas containers in Homosassa. Firefighters doused the blaze and found the melted gas containers.  

The cyberattack by hackers who lock up computer systems and demand a ransom to release them hit the pipeline on May 7. 

DarkSide, the Russian-based hackers responsible for the attack, didn’t take control of the pipeline’s operations but Colonial shut it down to prevent the malware from impacting its industrial control systems. 

The hacking group has since said it had hacked four other companies including a Toshiba subsidiary in Germany.

Colonial Pipeline has not determined how the initial breach occurred. 

The privately held company has focused on cleaning its networks, restoring data and reopening the pipeline.

They have also not disclosed how much money the hackers were seeking or whether it paid but sources confirmed it paid nearly $5 million to hackers.

The White House distanced itself from the ransom decision, referring all questions on the subject to Colonial, and President Biden refused to comment on Thursday when asked about the ransom payment.

The FBI consistently discourages companies and individuals from meeting criminal ransom demands, saying that it encourages further attacks. 

Republicans in Congress are expressing fury at Colonial for reportedly meeting the extortion demands of the Russia-linked hacking syndicate DarkSide.

‘The U.S. Government and U.S. companies should not pay ransoms to terrorists, as this only emboldens terrorist organizations and makes Americans the target of future attacks,’ Rep. Bruce Westerman, an Arkansas Republican, said in a statement.

‘Terrorist organizations should be met with the full force of the U.S. Government and the message should be unequivocally understood: America does not bow to terrorists,’ he added.

DarkSide, which emerged last summer and targets a wide range of US companies for extortion, has not been officially designated a foreign terrorist organization by the State Department.

‘The Colonial Pipeline is back online, but while we fill our cars with gas, the hackers lined their pockets with ransom money,’ tweeted Rep. Madison Cawthorn, a freshman Republican from North Carolina, the state hardest-hit in the fuel crisis.

‘American infrastructure should not be some stagecoach to be held up at gunpoint by foreign hackers. We need answers. This can never happen again,’ he added.