Tech

How the FBI Got Colonial Pipeline’s Ransom Money Back

After Colonial Pipeline Co. on May 8 paid roughly $4.4 million in cryptocurrency to hackers holding its computer systems hostage, the Federal Bureau of Investigation followed the digital money.

Over the next 19 days, court records show, a special agent watched on a publicly visible bitcoin ledger as hackers transferred the 75 bitcoins to other digital addresses. A May 27 transfer of nearly 64 bitcoins landed at a virtual address to which the FBI gained access, providing an opportunity to get a warrant and pounce.

On Monday, the Justice Department said it had recovered some of the cryptocurrency, equal to about $2.3 million of Colonial’s initial ransom.

The operation demonstrates investigators’ growing technical ability to disrupt the financial infrastructure that has enabled ransomware gangs to squeeze hundreds of millions of dollars from victims each year, cybersecurity experts say. Despite cryptocurrency’s reputation as a hard-to-trace medium of exchange useful to criminals and other groups that operate outside the traditional financial system, crypto experts say it is at times easier to track than hard currencies such as U.S. dollars.

“You can’t hide behind cryptocurrency,” said Elvis Chan, assistant special agent in charge of the cyber branch of the FBI’s San Francisco field office.

You May Also Like

World

France, which has opened its borders to Canadian tourists, is eager to see Canada reopen to the French. The Canadian border remains closed...

Health

Kashechewan First Nation in northern Ontario is experiencing a “deepening state of emergency” as a result of surging COVID-19 cases in the community...

World

The virus that causes COVID-19 could have started spreading in China as early as October 2019, two months before the first case was identified in the central city of Wuhan, a new study...

World

April Ross and Alix Klineman won the first Olympic gold medal for the United States in women’s beach volleyball since 2012 on Friday,...

© 2021 Newslebrity.com - All Rights Reserved.