Published
3 years ago on
September 08, 2020
- Argentina has refused to negotiate with a ransomware group that has pushed them to briefly close all immigration points in the country.
- Even though they actually closed these checkpoints on the 27th of August, the group demanded $2 million in order to restore its servers.
When I woke up today and looked at the latest news in the crypto space, one thing that flooded my timeline was that officials in Argentina have refused to negotiate with a ransomware group that has pushed them to briefly close all immigration points in the country.
Even though they actually closed these checkpoints on the 27th of August, a report was released on the 6th of September stating that the group of hackers had breached the immigration agency in Argentina at the end of last month and demanded $2 million in order to restore its servers.
The ransom note stated that their files were encrypted it and the only way to decrypt files is to purchase the “decryptor program“.
A significant amount of sensitive data was posted by the hacking group in order to prove that it was the one responsible for the attack. After one week, the malicious individuals increased the ransom to around $4 million (worth around 355 bitcoin).
A threat analyst and expert in these kinds of attacks, Brett Callow have said that these situations have the potential to be both disruptive as well as involving extremely sensitive data to the general public. He further went on to say:
“In the case of government departments, this is particularly problematic as the data can often be extremely sensitive, and in some cases even represent a risk to national security. More than 1 in 10 ransomware attacks now involve data theft, and the list of groups which routinely steal is steadily growing. Consequently, it’s very likely that incidents like this will become more and more common.”
It will be interesting to see how this situation plays out. For more news on this and other crypto updates, keep it with CryptoDaily!
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