Vogon Today

Selected News from the Galaxy

Economic Scenarios

State of emergency for hacker attacks! Costa Rica folded by ransomware and pirates

After a month of ransomware attacks, Costa Rica has declared a state of emergency , a measure usually reserved for dealing with natural disasters or the COVID-19 pandemic, but deemed necessary to allow the government to react more easily to the crisis.

This statement was one of the first acts of President Rodrigo Chaves, who was sworn in only last Sunday. The act was released Wednesday, but Chaves has not yet appointed members of the National Emergency Commission.

The statement focuses on the attack that Costa Rica is undergoing at the hands of "cybercriminals" and "cyberterrorists". The Russian-speaking band Conti has claimed a heavy assault on the public information systems of the Central American country, blocking several networks of the Ministry of Finance, starting with the collection of taxes and customs, and then expanding to the management of human resources, to social and work assistance. These are ransom attacks, therefore they require payments to free the attacked computers and currently part of the computers of the finance ministry are not yet active. Last week, the US State Department offered a $ 10 million reward for information leading to the identification or location of Conti's leaders.

In the US State Department statement last week, it was stated that the Conti group had been responsible for hundreds of ransomware incidents in the past two years. "The FBI estimates that as of January 2022, there were over 1,000 victims of Conti ransomware attacks with victim payments in excess of $ 150,000,000, making the Conti Ransomware variant the most expensive strain of ransomware ever documented."

In addition to the ransomware state of emergency, Chaves also eliminated the mandatory use of face masks in public spaces linked to the pandemic and issued a decree urging public institutions not to sanction officials who have not been vaccinated against COVID-19. reversing the policy of its predecessor. A president who immediately got busy!


Telegram
Thanks to our Telegram channel you can stay updated on the publication of new articles of Economic Scenarios.

⇒ Register now


Minds

The article State of emergency for hacker attacks! Costa Rica folded by ransomware and pirates comes from ScenariEconomici.it .


This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/stato-di-emrgenza-per-gli-attacchi-hacker-il-costa-rica-piegato-da-ransomware-e-pirati/ on Fri, 13 May 2022 11:06:33 +0000.