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. We 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,

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