Ransomware Groups Bouncing Back

Six days before Christmas, the US Department of Justice loudly announced a win in the ongoing fight against the scourge of ransomware: An FBI-led, international operation had targeted the notorious hacking group known as BlackCat or AlphV, releasing decryption keys to foil its ransom attempts against hundreds of victims and seizing the dark web sites it had used to threaten and extort them. “In disrupting the BlackCat ransomware group, the Justice Department has once again hacked the hackers,” deputy attorney general Lisa Monaco declared in a statement.

Two months and one week later, however, those hackers don't appear particularly “disrupted.” For the last seven days and counting, BlackCat has held hostage the medical firm Change Healthcare, crippling its software in hospitals and pharmacies across the United States, leading to delays in drug prescriptions for an untold number of patients.     READ MORE...

The Colonial Pipline

This pipeline stretches from Texas and curves around and through the south on it way to New Jersey... and, because it was secured properly was the victim of a hacker attack from a group located in Russia (but not necessarily sponsored by the Russian Government) which shut down oil transportation services to several southern States, including the on that I am living in, Tennessee.

While being online has its advantages, it also has its disadvantages and this is one of those disadvantages which is incidentally impacting millions of Americans.

This afternoon, my wife and I went to a local grocery store that sells gasoline on the side and filled up one of our vehicles along with a contain for our lawn mowers.  Each pump and there were 5 of them had vehicles beside them with 1-2 other vehicles waiting.  In less than 20 minutes, we had gasoline and were on our way.

Returning home, we passed our regular gasoline station, Weigle's and each of the 20 pumps had yellow bags covering the delivery pumps indicating that the entire station was out of gasoline...  this was completely unexpected since a local grocery store was still pumping gasoline.

It is unsure how long this gasoline shortage will last but one thing is for certain, it will cause gasoline prices to increase and that increase will not be reduced anytime soon...  and, because of that increase, the entire US Economy could be headed towards inflation which has not been a problem for almost a decade.

Interestingly, electric cars will be operating off of some kind of an online grid as will all the recharging stations and as the country moves closer and closer to the end of gasoline vehicles we might opened Pandora's Box as we transition from gasoline to electric.

Sometimes life is just a BITCH...