By Bryan Lendzion
June 11th, 2021
Over Memorial Day weekend the world’s largest meat supplying company, JBS (JBSS3.SA), was hacked putting their entire meat supply infrastructure at risk. This cyberattack was the second recent hijack after Colonial Pipeline was hacked on May 6th. Colonial Pipeline was left paying a ransom of 4.4 million dollars. This decision was made after executives from Colonial Pipeline decided that customers, partners, and individual employees' cybersecurity were the highest priority.
JBS had the same problems forced upon the executives of their company, and they also decided the best decision was to pay the ransom. JBS negotiated and arrived at a payment of 301 bitcoin, which equated to an $11 million sum.
One password is all it takes for hackers to interrupt some of the largest companies in the U.S. An article published by Reuters in June stated that the Colonial Pipeline system was compromised by a hacker stealing a single password. This caused a lot of criticism from U.S senators, questioning the company preparations and cybersecurity. Colonial responded that they invested over $200 million in the past five years to keep its pipeline cyber secure.
Cyber Attacks have been happening since the early 1990s, however, they have recently become a huge problem to the U.S economy. In the last 2 years, the usage of cryptocurrencies has increased foreign cybercriminals' incentive to hack large corporations. The bitcoin blockchain technology allows money to transfer from wallet to wallet anonymously. An article by NPR stated that if cybercriminals live in countries like Russia, which many do, there’s virtually no chance of getting caught.
Cyber Attackers are successfully collecting ransomware with the help of bitcoin, and foreign countries, like Russia, have not shown any sign of regulating their cybercriminals. This puts the U.S infrastructure and essentially the entire U.S economy at risk.
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