The State Department offered an award of up to $10 million for information that will help identify and locate the leaders of the DarkSide hacker group.
For information about the members of the group, the State Department offers a reward of up to $5 million. The US also called on countries harboring cybercriminals to “restore justice” to the hacker organization’s ransomware victims.
On May 7, as a result of a cyberattack, the pipeline of the US company Colonial Pipeline malfunctioned. The company’s computer networks were blocked by ransomware.
Major US media wrote that the DarkSide group, which is associated with Russia, was involved in the attack. This was later also confirmed by the FBI.
In turn, President Joe Biden said that the attack took place from the territory of Russia, but the American special services have no information about the involvement of the Russian authorities in it. Colonial Pipeline was fully operational on May 14th.
Bloomberg wrote that the company paid hackers about $5 million to restore access to the compromised systems. On June 16, at a summit in Geneva, US and Russian Presidents Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin agreed to begin bilateral consultations on cybersecurity.
The US president said after the summit that he had given Putin a list of 16 critical infrastructures that must be protected from cyberattacks – “from the energy sector to water supply systems.”
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