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 Uberti 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 want to be known as 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 cybercriminals have a brand. In the private sector, you really have a focus on the brand. Yeah, even cybercriminals have a brand.

In the private sector, you know, if I am trying to work with a different company in the U.S.,

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 Darkside, 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?

...