Colonial Pipeline paid nearly US$5 million to Eastern European hackers on Friday after a crippling cyberattack that shut the largest fuel pipeline network in the United States, Bloomberg News reported, citing two people familiar with the transaction.
The company paid the hefty ransom in untraceable cryptocurrency within hours after the attack, according to the report.
Colonial Pipeline did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
The hackers provided the operator with a decrypting tool to restore its disabled computer network after they received the payment, but the company used its own backups to help restore the system since the tool was slow, Bloomberg News reported.
After a six-day outage, the top U.S. fuel pipeline on Thursday moved some of the first millions of gallons of motor fuels.
(Reporting by Arathy S Nair in Bengaluru; Editing by Shounak Dasgupta)
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