Cybersecurity Shorts: Colonial Pipeline Attack, DarkSide’s Ransomware-as-a-Service and More

In this episode of the Futurum Tech Webcast, Cybersecurity Shorts series, my colleague Fred McClimans and I cover major happenings in the world of cybersecurity over the course of the past week. Our discussion centered on:

• The Colonial Pipeline cyberattack and the targeting by threat actor DarkSide of the IT system housing Colonial’s corporate and business data. This is a prime example of how targeting the weakest link can take down the whole system.
• DarkSide’s Ransomware-as-a-Service offering and why that’s so attractive for the hacker community.
• The surprise shut down of DarkSide’s servers, which caused the group to lose access to its blog, payment processing capability, and denial of service (DoS) operations.
• The Biden Administration signing of a new executive order aimed at strengthening the Federal government’s cybersecurity defenses.
• The FBI’s court-ordered effort to disrupt exploitation from Microsoft Exchange Servers.