Ransomware group Conti is threatening to overthrow the new government of Costa Rica and has raised its ransom demand to $20 million.
Since April 2022, Conti has been terrorizing Costa Rica with cyberattacks against ministries, foundations, institutions and electricity companies. The situation has become so critical that the government declared a state of emergency earlier this month.Let me remind you that we also reported that Russian hackers planned to disrupt eurovision 2022, and also that Chinese hackers use a new backdoor to spy on the country’s government from Southeast Asia.
Initially, the hackers demanded $10 million for a key to recover encrypted files. However, last weekend they published two messages on their leak site, increasing the ransom that Costa Rica must pay to $20 million and threatening to overthrow the government of new President Rodrigo Chavez.
To date, of the 670 GB of data stolen from the country, Conti has already published 97%, writes The Record.
Costa Rica has received aid from the United States, Israel and other countries. The US government has even offered a $10 million reward for information about Conti.
In the second message, the extortionists called US President Joe Biden a “terrorist” and announced an increase in the ransom.
More than three weeks have passed since the cyberattacks began, but Costa Rica is still struggling to recover, largely due to damage to the Treasury’s systems. Last week, the government even had to notify its citizens to manually calculate taxes and pay in person at local banks as the digital system failed.
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