Hi and welcome to Sabirism's malicious life, I'm Ran Levy.

Colonial Pipe Levy. Colonial Pipeline, a privately held pipeline operator, was founded in 1962.

Yet despite being one of the largest operators in the US and providing roughly 45% of the East Coast supply of gasoline, diesel fuel and even jet fuel, colonial pipeline became a household name only a few weeks ago and not in a good way.

On Friday, May 7th, 2021, colonial pipeline suffered a cyber attack that forced the company to shut down its operations.

As a result, gasoline outages were reported in many East Coast states, and the Federal Administration issued

a regional emergency declaration for several states to keep fuel supply lines open.

The entity behind the attack is a criminal group known as Darkside. For this B-side episode, Nate Nelson, our senior producer, spoke with Asaf de Han, head of threat research at

Cyberreason about the colonial pipeline attack.

How and why it happened and its implications, both for the security of critical infrastructure in the US

and for the criminal underground of ransomware groups. That last one is particularly interesting since it seems that the colonial pipeline

attack has set off a somewhat unexpected trend on the dark web.

That's it for me.

Over to Nate and Asaf.

Enjoy the interview. I'm a softahan. I'm the head of the nocturnus team. This is the threat

research team at Cyber Reason. My team kind of like tracks down different threat actors, beat cybercrime or APD nation state threat actors.

And yeah, that's pretty much it.

For those who don't know the full story,

what was the colonial pipeline attack?

Okay, so based on the information that is available to us,

we know that on May 6th the business network of the

colonial pipeline was compromised due to a ransomware attack. Now colonial

pipeline is the biggest supplier of fuels on the East Coast of the United States.

...