Yahoo Finance’s Dan Howley joins the Yahoo Finance Live panel to discuss the Colonial Pipeline CEO testimony before the Senate Homeland Security Committee earlier today.

Video Transcript

ZACK GUZMAN: But first, I want to kick things off with Bitcoin because yesterday was a rare triple negative day. Not only the Chinese social media site take down crypto-related accounts, but President Trump called Bitcoin a scam on Fox Business. Then you had another leg lower sparked by news over that Colonial Pipeline hack. Federal agents say they were able to claw back nearly half of the ransom paid to Dark Side hackers in that attack, roughly $2.3 million in a win for justice, but coming at the cost of a temporary pullback for Bitcoin.

Of course, reversible-- irreversible payments, I should say-- are one of the main tenants of Bitcoin's promise. But it doesn't appear feds were able to hack Bitcoin. Rather, gaining access to keys or passwords of the wallet used to extort funds in that operation. And for more on that, Yahoo Finance's Dan Howley kicks us off in this hour with the details. Dan.

DAN HOWLEY: That's right, Zack. We had that Colonial Pipeline CEO Joseph Blount sitting before senators today, giving his testimony as to how the hack happened and why he ended up paying a ransom. We have a little bit of a sound bite from him here.

JOSEPH BLOUNT: But I think if we look at the number of incidents that are taking place today throughout the world, let alone here in America, it's private industry alone can't do everything, can't solve the problem totally by themselves. So it's the partnership between private and government is very important to fight this ongoing onslaught of cyber attacks around the world.

DAN HOWLEY: So he's speaking there to the need for a public-private partnership whereby companies are able to contact the federal government, and the federal government is able to use all of its capabilities to fight back against this onslaught of ransomware. Again, the Bitcoin recovery that the Justice Department had was part of its new task force related to ransomware. They were able to access that wallet that had some of the ransom in there and recover that more than $2 million in Bitcoin. So it wasn't necessarily a hack of Bitcoin or the wallet itself.

And really, what's coming of this is it appeared to be just lax security or poor security. This was a legacy VPN profile that was used. And they did not have multifactor authentication on that VPN. Essentially, it was enter your password and you're in. Even us here at Yahoo Finance have to use multifactor authentication. We can't even log into our emails here with just a password. We need to use a secondary multifactor authentication to get in. So it kind of speaks to the vulnerabilities that some of these major companies have without even their knowledge. So we'll see more and more of this going forward as to how more companies will strengthen their cyber defenses.

ZACK GUZMAN: Yeah, more questions, too, about why that team behind the hack would have left it in that one wallet and not moved it farther and farther along. I mean, that seems like a pretty basic-- I'm not saying I'm a cyber criminal here, Dan Howley. I'm not saying you are either. But I'm sure if we were, that would be step number one to keep it moving. Obviously, it gets a lot easier for the task force behind it to find the funds if not moved. But Dan Howley, appreciate you bringing us the update there. And we'll continue to track Bitcoin's price in the wake of all that.