The recovery of Colonial Pipeline’s ransom payment is a major moment for cryptocurrency.

The Justice Department said on Monday that it had traced and seized much of the ransom that a major U.S. pipeline operator paid to a Russian hacking collective last month. The ransomware attack shut down the Colonial Pipeline for about a week, prompting fuel shortages and price spikes, until the company paid hackers more than $4 million worth of Bitcoin. But federal officials said that a new F.B.I. task force had recaptured most of the Bitcoins by, in essence, hacking the hackers.

Bitcoin transactions are anonymous but not untraceable. The hackers moved the ransom through dozens of accounts, which can be tracked on the blockchain, the public ledger of all Bitcoin transactions. Eventually, the funds landed in an account that a federal judge allowed the F.B.I. to break into. According to court documents, officials got the account’s “private key,” a crucial password that gives the owner complete control over the funds inside.

Tom Robinson of the blockchain analytics company Elliptic, who has been tracking the ransom payments, wrote in a blog post that the account compromised by the authorities appeared to hold the 85 percent share of the ransom that went to the client of DarkSide, the Russian “ransomware as a service” hacking group whose software was behind the attack. The remaining 15 percent was funneled through accounts presumably controlled by DarkSide developers.

In a way, this could be good for cryptocurrency, the DealBook newsletter reports. A major criticism of crypto is that its anonymity and ease of use make it suitable for crime, like the ransomware attacks that, by some measures, strike every eight minutes. The Justice Department didn’t divulge how it had seized the bulk of the Colonial ransom, but its success shows that it can comb the blockchain and crack into at least some accounts. That’s good for the traceability of cryptocurrency used for crime — but also goes against the decentralized, privacy-focused, anti-establishment benefits that some see as crypto’s greatest assets. (There are other cryptocurrencies with features that make them harder to trace than Bitcoin.)

Federal officials encouraged companies to work with the F.B.I. when attacked, as Colonial did, to help recoup ransom payments, which are thought to run into the billions of dollars (and are legal and even tax-deductible).

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A new Alzheimer’s medication is likely to further inflate high U.S. health care costs even as it is poised to be a blockbuster for Biogen, its manufacturer.

The drug is expected to become one of the best-selling pharmaceutical products in the world within a few years. Billions of dollars in anticipated costs are likely to be shouldered largely by Medicare, Rebecca Robbins and Pam Belluck report for The New York Times.

The drug’s approval could drive up insurance premiums, according to health care policy experts. And it could add new out-of-pocket costs for some families that are already facing years of staggering costs for caring for loved ones with Alzheimer’s.

“This is really what keeps me up at night: A therapy of this cost is going to have enormous implications for everyone,” said Dr. Joseph Ross, a pharmaceutical policy expert at Yale who sits on a committee that advises Medicare on some coverage decisions. “And by everyone, I literally mean you, too. There’s going to be some 60- and 70-year-olds on your plan. If they start getting this treatment, you will see your premiums will go up.”

Biogen’s $56,000 price tag is higher than many Wall Street analysts had expected. The company’s shares soared 38 percent on Monday.

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Parent PLUS loans are underwritten by the federal government and have become popular with parents who want to borrow to help pay for their children’s education. Many parents have turned to such loans as college costs have rocketed past wage growth, researchers say.

The loans account for nearly a quarter of new federal borrowing for undergraduates. They are still just 6 percent of the $1.57 trillion in current federal student debt, but they can be problematic because they allow families to borrow without regard to their ability to repay, Tara Seigel Bernard reports for The New York Times.

It’s also easier to accumulate heavier debts, because the only cap on parent PLUS loans is the total cost of attendance, minus any other aid provided. They generally carry higher interest rates than students’ loans, and come with fewer safeguards should a family’s financial situation take a turn for the worse. Only a basic credit check — looking for “adverse” events — is required to get one.

“The parent PLUS loan does not come with an attempt to understand the parents’ ability to repay,” said Rachel Fishman, deputy director of research for the higher education program at New America, a nonprofit research and policy group. “When the federal government is saying you can borrow this loan, and an institution is saying you can borrow this loan, that leads someone to believe that the federal government has done their due diligence. They have not.”

Kate Schweizer and her husband took out parent PLUS loans each academic year for their two daughters, eventually accumulating about $220,000 in debt. Today, they owe half a million dollars.

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After Black Lives Matter protests last year and an economic crisis that disproportionately sidelined women, corporate America vowed to be more inclusive. It threw its weight behind policies like child care that would foster an equitable recovery from the pandemic, promises that seemed to represent a sea change in what until recently had been an apolitical corporate landscape.

But in corporate boardrooms, little has changed. Boards have been, and continue to be, predominantly male and white, according to a new study that will be released on Tuesday.

The study, by the Alliance for Board Diversity and the consulting firm Deloitte, found that white women gained the most number of seats, increasing their presence at Fortune 100 companies by 15 percent and at Fortune 500 companies by 21 percent. But, in total, they still represent just about a fifth of all board seats. And minority women — which includes Black, Hispanic and Asian women — represent the smallest slice of boardrooms at both Fortune 100 (around 7 percent) and Fortune 500 (around 6 percent) companies. More than half of directors newly appointed to board seats last year were white men.

The report, however, analyzed data only through last June. More recent data from the research firm Institutional Shareholder Services found that since last July, the number of Black directors on boards of S&P 500 companies surged by nearly 200 percent, representing 32 percent of all newly appointed directors, up from 11 percent in 2019. Almost half of them were new to publicly traded company board services.

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