Colonial Pipeline CEO: Paying hackers $4.4M was the ‘right thing to do for the country’

One day after Colonial Pipeline confirmed an all-new system outage that the US fuel company stressed was not a product of some new hacking attack on the company, Colonial CEO Joseph Blount dropped a bombshell in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.

Back on May 7, an employee of the fuel company discovered a ransom note from the DarkSide gang of extortionists early in the day, setting this whole chain of events in motion. And by the evening, Blount now confirms, he had already made the decision that the company would pay up, agreeing to fork over the ransom payment of $4.4 million -- since at that point, Colonial couldn't be certain how deep the hackers had burrowed into their system. Blount acknowledged in this interview, his first since the catastrophe unfolded earlier this month, that the payment was a controversial move -- indeed, law enforcement officials frown on this, and plenty of cybersecurity journalists have gone on to lament that Colonial's actions will embolden other ransomware perpetrators -- but Blount is adamant: "I will admit that I wasn't comfortable seeing money go out the door to people like this. But it was the right thing to do for the country."