The Justice Department on Monday is expected to announce details of the operation led by the FBI with the cooperation of the Colonial Pipeline operator, the people briefed on the matter said. The ransom recovery is a rare outcome for a company that has fallen victim to a debilitating cyberattack in the booming criminal business of ransomware. Colonial Pipeline Co. CEO Joseph Blount told The Wall Street Journal In an interview published last month that the company complied with the $4.4 million ransom demand because officials didn’t know the extent of the intrusion by hackers and how long it would take to restore operations.
As they say, "Show us the money". The man in the cul de sac can't possibly know if any ephemeral BitCoin was actually "paid" to any Russian hackers, if indeed such people even exist. Nor can this gullible goof be confident that this mythological pixel money was returned to the cloud coffers of the Colonial enterprise.
It would seem that if the pipeline operator was required to fork over the untraceable digital funds that it would either have to manufacture them or obtain them from someone else. It seems unlikely that Colonial would be able to mint $4.4 million in BitCoins quickly through its own operations, instead getting these coins from someone who already possesses them.
In other words, BitCoins aren't real money but merely a newer example of financial shenanigans, an accounting device designed to screen the ownership of invisible digital assets.
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