By Justin Katz
May 11, 2021
The FBI on Monday attributed the cyberattack against Colonial Pipeline to ransomware group Darkside. The attack, which was announced on Friday, led to the shutdown of fuel pipelines serving the East Coast of the United States as a precautionary measure.
At a White House briefing on Monday, officials provided details on the government response. Deputy National Security Advisor Anne Neuberger described Darkside as ransomware as a service operation in which the malware developers share proceeds from attacks with partners. Neuberger didn t say whether the government believes the breach may have progressed from Colonial s IT to operational technology that controls the pipelines, citing the ongoing criminal investigation but said that such spread was a concern, and said that s why, quickly and effectively negating the spread of the ransomware is always the first area of priority.
Letters from Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.) to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Attorney General Merrick Garland and acting Defense Department Inspector General Sean O’Donnell asking for information, documents and, in the case of the Justice Department, a probe into possible anticompetitive behavior on the part of Amazon Web Services.
A complaint of political inference by former President Donald Trump in the Defense Department’s award of the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud computing contract to Microsoft in 2019 may now proceed.
Protecting the supply chain and CUI will only become more challenging as the number of defense contractors and the amount of data they house continues to increase.