Critical severity Famous Malware

DarkSide / Colonial Pipeline

The 2021 ransomware attack that shut 5,500 miles of US fuel pipeline for six days.

Overview

A single compromised password without multi-factor authentication on a legacy VPN account gave DarkSide access.\nThe operators encrypted nothing on the pipeline itself, yet Colonial shut it down because they could not bill or meter deliveries.\nThe outage triggered fuel hoarding across the south-eastern United States and pushed ransomware into national policy.\nMFA on every remote-access path is the lesson that stuck.

Indicators of Compromise

Signals that suggest this is present on a system.

VPN accounts without MFA
Legacy remote-access gateways exposed
Large data staged for exfiltration before encryption

References

Related entries

WannaCry Critical
NotPetya Critical
Emotet Critical
TrickBot Critical

Related glossary terms

CVE
Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures. A public identifier such as CVE-2021-44228 assigned...
Zero-Day
A vulnerability being exploited before the vendor has a patch available, so defenders have...
Command and Control (C2)
The infrastructure an attacker uses to send instructions to compromised hosts and receive...

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