The attack may have been "a major wake-up call" about the need for greater resilience in IT environments, but have security teams hit the snooze bar one too many times?
Spokespeople from Colonial and the US government declined Bloomberg’s request for comments.
According to the FBI, the hackers, known as Darkside, are in Eastern Europe or Russia and behind the attacks. Darkside reportedly expressed regret at the amount of damage it caused the company. The hackers said they were “apolitical” and didn’t “participate in geopolitics.”
Previous reports said that Colonial had no intention of paying the ransom. The FBI has discouraged organizations from paying ransom to cyber criminals, as there is no guarantee the hackers will provide tools to decrypt ransomed data.
Darren Van Booven, lead principal consultant at Trustwave and former CISO of the US House of Representatives, told