If you had not heard of DarkSide before you have probably heard of them now after their cyber attack on Colonial Pipeline that was successful. Interestingly enough some have even said that the low ransom paid by Colonial to regain access to the pipeline might have been done in part because of the hack being too successful and thus DarkSide actually not wanting to shutdown the whole pipeline network like they did. 

Quick Recap of What Occured

Earlier this month Colonial Pipeline was hacked and lost control of their pipeline system which supplies oil to much of the Eastern United States. This led to gas shortages as people began to panic buy more gas then they needed. The government actually had to come out and say that you could/should not pump gas into plastic bags...... really sometimes people just give me a headache trying to understand their logic. Even though the US has a policy to not negotiate with terrorist or actors of this variety Colonial ended up paying the ransom to recover access. 

In all the grand total to get the pipeline control back was a measly $5 million. Given the sheer size and volume this pipeline holds that $5 million was a slam dunk to pay to regain control. With the payment to be made in crypto it was a whooping 75 Bitcoins to get access back and restart the flow of oil. This is why some cybersecurity people have come out and said that DarkSky had gone to far this time and was more or less wanting to undo what they did as quickly as they could. They did not want the US government after them and with an outage this big caused it was going to happen. 

What has Happened Since

Once paid DarkSky released control Colonial brought its system back online but it was not long before DarkSky was back in the news. DarkSky announced that it was closing up due to its servers being seized and its crypto wallet being drained of all of its funds that the organization uses to pay for the resources it needs. With the loss of the public structure that they used and the funds all being "gone" they publically admitted that they were done.

Over time this has happened to hacking networks but they seem to always reappear. After all no on was arrested that we know of so far so those people are still out their. Now in the 9 months of its existence the wallet believed to have held the Bitcoin ransoms has reciveved approzimently $90 million in those 9 months. With the hacker group believing to be located in Eastern Europe or maybe Russia, they are not affiliated with the Russian government, this amount of money could go a very very long way. Only time will tell if the group is truly done and gone but at least publically they are done.....        for now.