Colonial Pipeline Paid Hackers Nearly $5M in Ransom

Re:Colonial Pipeline Paid Hackers Nearly $5M in Ransom by phkahler on Thursday May 13, 2021 @05:13PM (#27147543)

unless your data is legally required to stay confidential under HIPPA or similar law. Then a backup just keeps you operating but not immune to the threat of data publication.

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Re:Colonial Pipeline Paid Hackers Nearly $5M in Ransom by dragontamer on Thursday May 13, 2021 @05:33PM (#27147759)

What data needs to be confidential in the case of the Colonial Pipeline?

I'm sure that there's proprietary data. Maybe knowing how much oil / gasoline is flowing might allow some traders to make unfairly informed trades (or maybe not: only inside trading is illegal. If someone figures out the information some other way, its not illegal IIRC).

And maybe employee data should be kept private, but there's no HIPPA requirement on that. Its not like there's payment processors on this thing either, so no PCI compliance here.

So I'm not exactly seeing why backing up data would be an issue in this case.

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Re:Colonial Pipeline Paid Hackers Nearly $5M in Ransom by johnvaluk on Thursday May 13, 2021 @05:30PM (#27147720)

While the threat of publication is a risk, the data has already been breached and you are no longer compliant with the law.

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Re:Colonial Pipeline Paid Hackers Nearly $5M in Ransom by mateo- on Thursday May 13, 2021 @05:31PM (#27147731)

I wonder if companies still get fined if the data is just encrypted without any exfil

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