to share with them what we knew at that time. “When Colonial was attacked on May 7, we quietly and quickly contacted the local FBI field offices in Atlanta and San Francisco, and prosecutors in Northern California and Washington D.C. “New financial technologies that attempt to anonymize payments will not provide a curtain from behind which criminals will be permitted to pick the pockets of hardworking Americans.”īlount issued a statement following the DOJ announcement. “The extortionists will never see this money,” acting US Attorney Stephanie Hinds for the Northern District of California said at the news conference at the Justice Department Monday. The seizure warrant was authorized through the US Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California.

“Ransom payments are the fuel that propels the digital extortion engine, and today’s announcement demonstrates that the United States will use all available tools to make these attacks more costly and less profitable for criminal enterprises.” “Following the money remains one of the most basic, yet powerful, tools we have,” Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said Monday during the DOJ announcement, which followed CNN’s reporting about the recovery operation. Ransomware attacks saddle Biden with grave national security crisisīut behind the scenes, the company had taken early steps to notify the FBI and followed instructions that helped investigators track the payment to a cryptocurrency wallet used by the hackers, believed to be based in Russia. CEO Joseph Blount told The Wall Street Journal in an interview published last month that the company complied with the $4.4 million ransom demand because officials didn’t know the extent of the intrusion by hackers and how long it would take to restore operations. The ransom recovery, which is the first seizure undertaken by the recently created DOJ digital extortion taskforce, is a rare outcome for a company that has fallen victim to a debilitating cyberattack in the booming criminal business of ransomware.Ĭolonial Pipeline Co. The FBI said it has been investigating DarkSide, which is said to share its malware tools with other criminal hackers, for over a year. Specifically, the Justice Department said it seized approximately $2.3 million in Bitcoins paid to individuals in a criminal hacking group known as DarkSide. The announcement confirms CNN’s earlier reporting about the FBI-led operation, which was carried out with cooperation from Colonial Pipeline, the company that fell victim to the ransomware attack in question. US investigators have recovered millions in cryptocurrency they say was paid in ransom to hackers whose attack prompted the shutdown of the key East Coast pipeline last month, the Justice Department announced Monday.

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