Colonial Pipeline reportedly paid almost $5 million to the hackers responsible for the cyberattack that forced the shutdown of its gas infrastructure.
Colonial Pipeline paid the ransom amount using cryptocurrency within hours of the attack, highlighting the pressure the company faced to get gas flowing again to customers on the East Coast, according to Bloomberg.
This contradicts reports from earlier this week that the company had no plans of paying a fee to decrypt important data files and help get the gas pipeline up and running again.
After receiving the ransom amount, the hackers gave Colonial Pipeline a decrypting tool to get access to its data again and restore the broken network. However, the hackers' tool was so slow and ineffective that the company used its own data backups to help bring the system back to life, Bloomberg reported.
