Incredible details keep trickling out about the Russian DarkSide hackers

In the seemingly never-ending cascade of news headlines about hacks, data breaches and ransomware attacks like the one from this weekend executed by a Russian criminal gang against a major US fuel pipeline, the bad guys often appear as a kind of faceless, nearly-anonymous menace. Compared to almost any other time when reporters write about crime, actual flesh-and-blood characters usually emerge - whether in the form of mug shots, arrest details, or through eyewitness accounts and the like. The hackers on the other end of a computer crime, however, enjoy a certain degree of freedom to operate without being seen. If anything, the only thing we end up beholding is their handiwork, while we’re told by Very Serious Government Experts that the attack came from Iran, China, Russia or some other far-flung nation-state where hackers thrive.

When it comes to the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack from this weekend, however, almost from the get-go a series of fascinating details have been trickling out about the DarkSide ransomware gang from Russia that US experts pointed the finger at — and the DarkSide hackers, themselves, have even taken responsibility for the attack. In fact, the cybercriminals actually posted a kind of “oops” statement on their website, suggesting that what they were mostly after was money here, not a significant attack on a major piece of US infrastructure.