1. Need confirmation on this. If true, then these guys are Supreme Idiots.

2. I take this in a different direction, namely, that the administration behind Biden (Obama and Co) either already knew or already found out, who hacked the pipeline and thanked them and rewarded them or in the extreme case, paid them the fee to do business for the administration…as agreed upon months ago.

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3. Rather than hanging their corpses at the tank farm, I’d be OK with their heads on pikes outside the Russian embassy. Cheaper shipping costs, more visible.

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4. And when asked about the ransom the Admin stated “It is a private matter for a private company to decide. It isn’t up to the government to make that decision.”

   So the private company looked at the state of the country and what the shutdown pipeline was doing to the country, they considered paying Blackwatert bring back heads but were forbidden by law from doing so.

   They did the only thing they had the power to do, pay.

   Screwed if you do, screwed if you don’t.

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5. 5 mil in US$? What is that, 100 bitcoin?

   Last one I did (ransomeware recovery), they were wanting .5 bitcoin, ~$25K.

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6. Look at this another way, paying the ransom got fuel flowing again, and gave investigators a route to the hackers that might bring them to justice? Albeit not satisfying your desire for mayhem

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   1. Acshually….

      They paid the ransom.
      The unlock tool <a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9575133/East-Coast-fuel-supplies-two-WEEKS-return-normal-say-experts.html&quot;didn’t work very well.
      And they had to restore from backups anyway.

      The company did a calculation that it would be cheaper to pay the ransom and get their stuff back quickly than it would be to restore from backups. That is the correct calculation.

      The problem is they expected the decryption tool to have been competently written. It wasn’t. What, are they going to get their money back now?

      1. Of course it’s entirely possible that the criminals didn’t have a decrypt tool in the first place. Why go through all that hard work? The victim won’t find out until after the money is paid.
         Meanwhile, the authorities need to give Putin a 7 day ultimatum to deliver up the perpetrators, dead or alive.

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7. Democrats want to control every aspect of our lives, but when asked about this, they’re all about the private sector doing its thing. Totally hands off.

   Yep we’re fucked. This attack to me seemed like a dry run – hit something important, but not totally cut us off at the knees. If they hit the water supply or worse, the power grid next time?? A week without power and the affected region will look like Mosul after all the looting and arson. Everything at the grocery store goes bad, and probably the distribution center too. No gas at all..water is gone after 1-2 days. Add another week or two to get the supply chain flowing again. Then you have to deal with panic buying and people fighting to get what trickles in. Probably a month of complete societal breakdown before any semblance of normalcy. Get your preps in order.

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8. Old news is old. Ransoms have been paid since the begining including for hospitals, towns/cities/states, individuals, and other infrastructure.

   If no one paid the ransom, ransomware wouldn’t be a thing…

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