The government of Costa Rica declared a national emergency on May 8th, 2022, Sunday, as most of its government websites were impacted by ransomware, disrupting servers and back-end operations to the core.
Rodrigo Chaves, the President of Costa Rica, released an official statement on this note and added that the hackers were demanding $10 million to hand over the stolen 672GB data and decrypt the locked-up files.
Conti Ransomware gang has declared that it is behind the incident and said that it is ready to negotiate with the government for a 20% discount.
Concernedly, the Costa Rican Social Security Fund (CCSS), a health care agency, was also targeted in the incident by the Conti gang and about 72GB of its data was leaked onto the dark web a few hours ago.
Second is the news related to the Colonial Pipeline Cyber Attack that took place at the same time last year. The US Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) has issued a notice to the management of Colonial Pipeline and proposed a penalty of $986,400, i.e. nearly $1 million.
On May 8th,2021, Colonial Pipeline declared its servers were targeted by Darkside ransomware spreading gang disrupting the distribution of gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel from Texas to New Jersey. As a result of the digital attack, a kind of fuel shortage arise across 17 states and the white house was ready to declare a state emergency as at one point the fuel shortage was declared to be severe.
A special inquiry team was appointed by the government in June 2021 and it discovered that Colonial Pipeline failed to protect its IT Infrastructure with appropriate cyber security measures and so a penalty of nearly $1m was being levied. However, the fuel supplier will be given adequate time to file a counter-petition against the penalty.
