Costa Rica's social security fund (CCSS), a public health service institution in Costa Rica, was recently attacked by hive blackmail software, which forced the relevant systems to be offline. CCSS said on its official twitter account that the attack began early Tuesday morning and is currently under investigation.
CCSS said that several wage and pension databases, including the unified digital medical system and the centralized tax collection system, were not affected by the attack. In an interview with local media, the agency added that at least 30 of the 1500 government servers were infected with hive ransomware, and the estimated recovery time is still unknown.
Several employees of CCSS said that after all their printers began spitting out incomprehensible documents, they were told to turn off their computers. Another employee said that due to the attack, the results of covid-19 could not be reported at present.
The attack came weeks after Costa Rica's president, rodrigochavez, declared a state of emergency in response to a cyber attack by conti extortion software group. Costa Rica's Ministry of finance is the first government agency to be attacked by this Russian related hacker organization. In a statement on May 16, Chavez said that the number of institutions affected was later increased to 27.
In a message posted on his secret Internet leak blog at that time, conti urged Costa Rican citizens to pressure their government to pay the ransom. The organization increased the ransom from the initial $10million to $20million. In a separate statement, the group warned. "We are determined to overthrow the government through cyber attacks, and we have shown you all our strength and strength.".
Network security experts believe that the cyber criminals behind the latest hive extortion software attack may cooperate with conti Gang to help the gang rebuild its brand and escape international sanctions against the payment of extortion money to cyber criminals operating in Russia.