- An agency connected to the Ministry of Agriculture of the Dominican Republic has been attacked by the Quantum ransomware group.
- Quantum demands $650.000 as ransom which the agency most likely will not be able to afford to pay.
- The ransomware group also claims that they have 1 TB of data to be leaked if the agency does not pay the ransom.
Ransomware gangs are just going on disrupting organizations, companies, and government agencies. The latest ransomware attack news comes from the Dominican Republic. According to the local media in the country, their government agencies have been hacked by a ransomware group, Quantum. The group demands more than $600,000 from the government.
Some basic security measures
The attack has been conducted on the 18th of August, last week, and resulted in the encryption of four physical servers and eight virtual servers. Those servers belong to the Instituto Agrario Dominicano (IAD); which is an agency under the Ministry of Agriculture of the Dominican Republic and responsible for executing Agrarian Reform programs.
IAD director Walixson Amaury Nunez states that their systems have relied on very basic security software like antivirus and they did not have a dedicated security department. According to some sources, the agency will not pay the ransom because they can’t afford it. The Quantum ransomware group claims they also have 1 TB of Instituto Agrario Dominicano data to be leaked if the agency does not pay the ransom.
The Quantum ransomware group is said to be a subgroup of Conti, which is a well-known ransomware actor and was said to be shutting down in late June this year.