Cyber attack headlines trending on Google

Finally what we did not expect is happening as a British court has ordered Bitfinex to freeze a Bitcoins payments as it was leading to the wallets of those distributing ransomware.

Yes, you have read it right! As most of the cryptocurrency variants can easily be tracked now, an England and Wales High Court has asked Bitfinex to lock down the bitcoins worth $860,000 stored in one of its user wallets until it submits the KYC form details of the customer.

As some of the amounts have been converted to fiat currency and only the left out residue of $800,000 has been frozen as per the court orders.

In other news related to ransomware, Israel based Cybersecurity firm Otorio disclosed that a petroleum-based company named Bahrain Petroleum has become a potential victim of cyber attack and research has found that its Industrial Control Systems were targeted by a new variant of Snake ransomware developed by Iran.

The most interesting part of this malware is that it removes all files from the infected systems after sending them to remote servers which eventually prevents the victims from recovery.

Going with the third news which is trending on Google, reports are in that hackers distributing REvil Ransomware infection are demanding a minimum of $260,000 to decrypt files.

For those who do not know much about REvil, it is a gang offering ransomware as a service where the operators rent the malware to cybercriminals who then customize the malware as per their requirements.

According to a study made by KPN, Revil has so far earned its developers and affiliates over $38 million over the last few months, with $260,000 as an average demand per targeted company.

Coming to the 4th cyber-attack news related to ransomware, hackers from Turkey were found targeting governments and private companies operating in Europe and the Middle East. 

It is believed that around 30 organizations have been targeted by the attack so far and this includes government ministries, embassies and security services. And some of the victims include Cypriot, Greek email services and the advisory agency for the Iraqi government.

A report published in Reuters says that interception of web traffic to targeted websites and offering prohibited access to hackers to the network government agencies and other organizations have been the main motive of the Turkish hackers so far.

Turkey has denied this news published in the American news resource and said that the nation has itself become a victim of cyber attacks on a frequent note launched by state-funded foreign nations.

Fifthly, speaking at the Cybertech Global Tel Aviv 2020 Conference, Israel Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz said that the nation’s power plants were being constantly targeted by foreign nations. However, all the attacks were neutralized on a successful note and could have proven serious due to their sophistication of pushing an entire nation in a blackout. Note- Israel has been cooperating with the United States in the field of Cybersecurity and has been putting a special emphasis on protecting the energy infrastructure from devastating cyber threats.