O Angola's Ministry of Finance recently communicated, according to Jornal de Angola, that the technological platform to support its activities with access to emails and shared folders was the target of a cyber attack last Thursday, February 17th, with unidentified origins and motivations.
Fortunately, the problem is already overcome, after several hours of work with attempts to recover the affected services, as the hackers requested payment so that the Ministry of Finance could regain access to the system.
According to information provided by the source, without elaborating on details, the Ministry of Finance explains that, despite the scenario described by experts, “it would not be advisable to pay ransom” for files and documents hacked, ensures that the documentary collection is available as well as the system has already been recovered thanks to the joint work developed with partners. Finance also ensures that they have strengthened the surveillance system.
What is the ransom value?
The attack the institution was subjected to was possibly of the type Ransomware, whose objective, explains Sungo Afonso (experts in technology and cybersecurity), is to encrypt important files or documents, forcing the victim to pay a large amount in virtual currencies, such as bitcoin, in exchange for seeing the files recovered.
In fact, hackers do it for their own reasons or because they are part of an organized group of criminals who have goals to make money. The value usually varies from organization to organization and can be estimated in millions of dollars in Bitcoin. There may also be institutions or people that hire hackers for personal purposes to erase financial trails, compromising documents. But the truth is that, even if the ministry paid the amount charged for the ransom, there was no guarantee that the encryption key would be given to recover the blocked documents.
They value more those who use facts and give it, if an IT asks for funds to invest in the prevention of situations like these, it will not be even found, but when the situations happen they want to go crazy looking for solutions that do not exist except prevention.