The recent hacking of Hondutel, which is being investigated by the FBI and MP, as well as the attacks suffered a few weeks ago by the governments of Costa Rica and Peru, where they were threatened by a group of Russian cybercriminals, shows how vulnerable Latin America still is in terms of cybersecurity.
The Honduran Telecommunications Company (Hondutel) was the victim of a fraud attempt after an email account was hacked to request a payment of 88 thousand dollars to a US company, which is a partner of the state-owned company.
The recently elected President Rodrigo Chaves of Costa Rica, took action against the attacks that several government institutions received last April. The Russian cybercriminal group Conti reported on their blog on the dark web that they had hacked approximately 800 servers of the Costa Rican Ministry of Finance, asking for a payment of $10 million to reverse the encryption of the files. They claimed to have 1TB of stolen information.
In Perú, the Russian cybercriminal group announced that it managed to infiltrate the website of the National Intelligence Directorate. The cybercriminal gang uploaded a note on its “dark web” blog site claiming to have access to its critical infrastructure, including the water and electricity network, and threatened to leak this sensitive data if the government does not pay a ransom.
Cyber risks for Latin American companies, whether infrastructure, construction or government, are a growing concern as they advance digitally, due to the disclosure and sharing of their networks, which can reduce reliability, agility and speed in case of an event or attack, as well as increasing costs. Within the governance and management model of companies, cybersecurity should be considered a very important component.
To prevent such attacks, there are solutions such as RidgeBot from RidgeSecurity, RidgeBot is robot that is presented with collective knowledge of threats, vulnerabilities, exploits and is equipped with state-of-the-art hacking techniques. RidgeBot acts like a real attacker, locates relentless exploits and documents its findings.
Ridge Security enables enterprises and web application teams, DevOps, ISVs, governments, healthcare, education or anyone responsible for ensuring software security to test their systems cost-effectively and efficiently.
For more information contact your local vendor or visit https://ridgesecurity.ai.