The servers of Darkside, the hacker group behind the cyberattack targeting U.S. oil pipeline operator Colonial Pipeline last week, have been taken offline, cybersecurity firm Recorded Future said on Friday.
Read also: Colonial Pipeline: Biden wants to talk about cybercrime with Putin
According to the company, the hacker who demanded a ransom from Colonial Pipeline admitted that Darkside had lost access to several of the servers the group uses to host their blog or to get paid.
Accessible via the TOR browser on the dark web, the underground version of the internet, the Darkside site was inaccessible Friday morning.
"
A few hours ago, we lost access to the public part of our infrastructure, namely our blog, our payment server and our DoS servers
", wrote in an article a hacker using the pseudonym Darksupp, quoted by Recorded Future.
Doubts about the payment of a ransom by Colonial Pipeline
Denial of Service (DoS) attacks aim to shut down a website by overloading it with traffic. Darksupp also indicated that cryptocurrency funds, used to pay ransoms demanded by the hacker group, had been withdrawn. A Recorded Future analyst, however, believes that Darskide's confession may be a subterfuge allowing the group to shut down its infrastructure itself to avoid having to pay its associates. According to information from Bloomberg, Colonial Pipeline would have paid 5 million dollars to the hackers, information which contradicts that of the Washington Post, which affirms that the company did not pay any money. Asked by AFP, a spokesperson for Colonial Pipeline did not comment, indicating only thatthere was an ongoing investigation. The Biden administration also refrained from commenting while stressing that companies should strengthen their IT security.
Resumption of fuel delivery
The attack on the computer systems of Colonial Pipeline, which transports nearly half of America's petroleum products from the Gulf of Mexico to the east coast of the United States, forced the operator to shut down all of its operations.
This caused a wave of panic among many motorists, fearing a shortage of gasoline and rushing to gas stations.
Colonial Pipeline, however, said Thursday evening to have restarted its entire system and restarted the delivery of fuels.