Welcome to DarkSide – and the inexorable rise of ransomware | John Naughton

The hacking of a US gas pipeline is proof that cybercrime is now a major industry - with its own trading markets and even CSR

On Friday 7 May, Colonial, the quaintly named operator of the pipeline that brings 45% of the US east coast's gasoline and jet fuel from Texas to New York, announced that it had been hacked. My initial assumption was that this was Russian retaliation for the Biden administration's punitive cyber-attacks on Russia in response to the SolarWinds hack. After all, if a pipeline like this isn't critical infrastructure", what is? If so, were we not witnessing a significant escalation in information warfare between two nuclear-armed powers?

Fortunately, my overheated imagination turned out to be wrong, but the reality - in a way - is almost as interesting. On 10 May, the FBI announced that the attack on Colonial was caused by an outfit called DarkSide, which specialises in ransomware, and that the bureau had forced the company to halt its pipeline's operations so that it could carry out a full investigation into the breach.