Scams and frauds have become prevalent in the cryptocurrency industry, with the community taking precautions against the devastating consequences they can have. Over the last few years, the world of virtual assets has done its best to combat this pariah, but even then, one or two major issues are still emerging.
The latest scam to rock the financial and decentralized world was a ransomware attack that halted Argentina’s border crossing for four hours. According to reports, the hackers demanded Bitcoin to lift the curb that they had put on the national system.
What makes this ransomware attack different from other instances is the fact that this was the first time a national process was interrupted for the sake of money. Argentina’s official immigration agency, the Dirección Nacional de Migraciones first reported the Netwalker ransomware attack on August 27th after which the discussion has been about paying the $4 million ransom.
The agency added:
“Being approximately 7 a.m. of the day indicated in the paragraph above, the Directorate of Technology and Communications under the Directorate General Information Systems and Technologies of this Organization received numerous calls from various checkpoints requesting technical support. The Comprehensive Migration Capture System (SICaM) that operates in international crossings was particularly affected, which caused delays in entry and exit to the national territory”
Further details revealed that the organization did not consider it as an ordinary situation and that the event was evaluated against the infrastructure of the Central Data Center and Servers Distributed. The attack targetted the organization’s MS Windows-based files such as ADA SYSVOL and SYSTEM CENTER DPM. Sources have revealed that the $4 million ransom first started out as $2 million, which was jacked up because of the delay in payment. The attackers demanded the ransom to be paid in bitcoin, almost worth 55 BTC.
The website run by the scammers can be viewed on Tor with a link to a “Stolen Data” page. Here, users can view a screenshot of the content stolen from the Argentinan agency as proof. Investigative agencies are still trying to deal with the threat with many claiming that the hackers had covered every last step.
