Colonial Pipeline President and CEO Joseph Blount was grilled by lawmakers Tuesday on his decision to pay hackers in a ransomware attack that forced a temporary shutdown of operations \u2014 and led to gas shortages in parts of the country.<\/p>\n
During a sometimes-tense Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing, Blount indicated that the company did not consult with the FBI and other agencies before it paid the equivalent of $4.4 million in bitcoin to regain control of its systems.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was our understanding that the decision was solely ours as a private company to make the decision about whether to pay or not to pay,\u201d Blount said in response to a question from Sen.\u00a0Gary Peters\u00a0(D-Mich.), the panel\u2019s chairman.<\/p>\n
\u201cConsidering the consequences of potentially not bringing the pipeline back on as quickly as I possibly could, I chose the option to make the ransom payment,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Blount apologized for the impact of the attack but stressed that he had no regrets.<\/p>\n
\u201cI believe with all my heart it was the right choice to make,\u201d Blount testified.<\/p>\n
Colonial provides 45 percent of the East Coast\u2019s fuel. Shortages were seen in several states for more than a week following the shutdown.<\/p>\n
Blount\u2019s testimony came a day after Justice Department officials announced that they had recovered the majority of the ransom paid by Colonial to the DarkSide ransomware group.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Colonial Pipeline President and CEO Joseph...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-36134","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36134","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=36134"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36134\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36135,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36134\/revisions\/36135"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=36134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=36134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=36134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}