A quick warning before we get started, there is a little salty language in today's episode.

When the colonial pipeline system got hacked and the gas market across the east coast was

paralyzed and prices shot up, I kept thinking about something David Uberty told me last year.

David covers cybersecurity for the Wall Street Journal and he writes a lot about ransomware

attacks where hackers lock up a company's data in demand for ransom. And that's what happened to

colonial. What he told me was that the hackers who do this think a lot about their reputations.

So when I called him up this week, I had to ask about that. They wanted me known as like

being easy to work with, having good customer service. Why? Well, I think as with any enterprise,

you really have a focus on the brand. Yeah, even cyber criminals have a brand. In the private sector,

you know, if I am trying to work with a different company in the US, totally legitimate reasons,

I worry about that company's brand. And the same is true in some respects for hacking groups.

It just seems to me like, if you're thinking about dark side, this group that's apparently linked

to hacking the colonial pipeline, paralyzing the East Coast gas market, it seems like that's pretty

bad for your brand. Not exactly a shining moment for them. So I mean, to take a step back,

the reason why a brand is important is because when a hacking group attacks a particular company,

they get inside their computer systems, they deploy ransomware. Executives at that company have to

decide to what extent do we trust this group? They got to ask, are these hackers going to let us

run the pipeline again? Get gas to millions of angry drivers, if we pay up, basically should we

pay the ransom that they're asking for? Some of these companies that negotiate ransoms

for victims, they basically keep dossiers about some of these ransomware organizations. They do

brand and market research to see which hacking groups are reliable in sort of a weird criminal

way, and which are not to be trusted. Most of the time, these negotiations are quiet. You and I

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