Last Updated on 06/02/2022 by Nidhi Khandelwal
Image courtesy; Forbes
According to an official, cyber attacks facilitating ransomware can cripple an entire nation, it can affect infrastructure, important services, consumer protection, economy and privacy.
Maintaining cybersecurity is an essential part of our routine, efforts should be made to strengthen the network by applying 2FA, updating devices, using strong passwords, alert for malicious links and documents and maintaining backups from time to time.
These countries have come together to promote mechanisms that will help victims to respond effectively to cyberattacks and he’ll them to deal with ransom payments. They also want to promote sharing of information between victims and law-enforcements.
While ministers from countries like Brazil, Canada, Poland, Japan, India, Germany and many more countries were in this motion, China and Russia were evidently not in the list.
Globally the payments have surpassed USD 500 million in the last two years and so the establishment of a counter ransomware alliance has to come in that will necessitate the payment flows that make the activities profitable being subject to anti-money laundering regulations and the networks that facilitate these payments being held accountable.
The US Treasury Department levied penalties on Russian cryptocurrency exchange Suex in late September 2021 for assisting threat actors in laundering transactions from at least eight ransomware versions, marking the first time such action against a virtual currency exchange had been taken. According to the US government, to diminish the motivation for hackers to continue to conduct these attacks, the Treasury will continue to take action against these ransomware perpetrators and their money laundering networks.
The development follows an independent report released on Friday by the department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), which linked roughly $5.2 billion in outgoing Bitcoin transactions to 10 of the most commonly reported ransomware variants, as well as identifying 177 unique wallet addresses used for ransomware-related payments, based on an analysis of 2,184 suspicious activity reports (SARs) filed between January 1, 2011, and June 30, 2018.
Ransomware-based financial activity is predicted to have taken at least $590 million for threat actors in the first half of 2021 alone, with the mean average total monthly suspicious amount of ransomware transactions put at $66.4 million. REvil (aka Sodinokibi), Conti, DarkSide, Avaddon, and Phobos were the most widely reported versions.
