Pipeline Investigation Upends Idea That Bitcoin Is Untraceable
The F.B.I.’s recovery of Bitcoins paid in the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack showed cryptocurrencies are not as hard to track as it might seem.
Gas lines at Costco in Greensboro, N.C., last month during the shutdown of the Colonial Pipeline from a ransomware attack.Credit.Woody Marshall/News & Record, via Associated Press
June 9, 2021, 3:54 p.m. ET
When Bitcoin burst onto the scene in 2009, fans heralded the cryptocurrency as a secure, decentralized and anonymous way to conduct transactions outside the traditional financial system.
Criminals, often operating in hidden reaches of the internet, flocked to Bitcoin to do illicit business without revealing their names or locations. The digital currency quickly became as popular with drug dealers and tax evaders as it was with contrarian libertarians.
F.B.I. Director Compares Danger of Ransomware to 9/11 Terror Threat
The Biden administration is taking steps to counter the growing threat of cyberattacks on U.S. businesses, and encouraging companies to do more to protect themselves.
Christopher A. Wray, the F.B.I. director, said that Russia was harboring some of the most dangerous ransomware groups.Credit.Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times
June 4, 2021Updated 8:39 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON The Biden administration is sounding increasingly urgent alarms about high-profile ransomware attacks that have caused widespread gas shortages, shut meat processing plants and paralyzed hospitals, as officials step up efforts to counter cyberthreats.
Are We Waiting for Everyone to Get Hacked?
It’s been almost a decade since Leon Panetta, then the secretary of defense, warned of an impending “Cyber Pearl Harbor.” He didn’t want to be right.
Credit.Cayce Clifford for The New York Times
June 5, 2021Updated 5:56 a.m. ET
MONTEREY, Calif. Leon Panetta is one of the few American government officials who can look around at the nation’s rolling cyberdisasters and
justifiably say, “I told you so.”
The former secretary of defense was among the first senior leaders to warn us, in the most sober of terms, that this would happen in a 2012 speech that many derided as hyperbolic. He didn’t foretell every detail, and some of his graver predictions a cyberattack that could derail passenger trains loaded with lethal chemicals have yet to play out. But the stark vision he described, of hackers seizing our critical switches and contaminating our water supply, is veering dangerously close to the reality we are living with n
Readers discuss a tennis player's decision not to play, rather than confront the media. Also: Israel and Gaza; driverless cars; ransomware attacks; India's Covid mistake; police reform.