UK High Court Call for Proprietary Injunction on Canadian Bitcoin Ransomware Attack 

• A High Court has ordered an injunction on leading cryptocurrency obtained by a ransomware attack on an insurance company in Canada.
• At the end of last week, the High Court released documents in regards to such a ransomware attack.

A High Court in the United Kingdom has ordered a proprietary injunction on leading cryptocurrency obtained by a ransomware attack on an insurance company based in Canada. The injunction is an order which prevents certain individuals from dealing with their own assets when it’s subject of a proprietary claim - in other words, they are a suspect and their assets are questionable.

At the end of last week, the United Kingdom High Court released documents in regards to such a ransomware attack. Over 1000 pieces of equipment from the insurance company were essentially rendered useless through the use of malware that encrypted files and made them completely unusable. The attackers demanded over $1 million worth of bitcoin in exchange for the data to be decrypted on the network.

The companies insurance covered the clients’ losses from cybercrime and agreed with the hackers to pay just under $1 million in bitcoin to decrypt the files. Following this, they received the tool to unlock them around 24 hours after making the payment. Of course, that’s one day in business that has gone useless essentially. On top of that, if it wasn’t bad enough, the company needed over a week (specifically 10 days) to restore all of its systems including 20 servers and 1000 desktop computers before they were able to get up and running again.

The insurer hired a blockchain major analytics firm Chainalysis in order to track the ransom. According to their analysis, it revealed that most of the bitcoin (96 BTC) had been immediately laundered through the Bitfinex platform. The High Court required Bitfinex to provide any information in regards the holder of the account that received the ransom at the end of last month.

The firm hasn’t clarified the status of the ransom as all the bitcoin that was ransomed was quickly laundered. However, they did say:

“Bitfinex has robust systems in place to allow it to assist law enforcement authorities and litigants in cases such as this. In this case we have assisted the Claimant to trace the stolen Bitcoin and we understand the focus of the Claimant’s attention is no longer on the Bitfinex platform. It now appears Bitfinex is an entirely innocent party mixed up in this wrongdoing.”

It will be interesting to see how this situation plays out. For more news on this and other crypto updates, keep it with CryptoDaily!