Russian hackers, US offers 10 million USD reward: Costa Rica, not the only one

The State Department’s reward was offered to anyone who provided information about the identity or location of the organization’s leaders, which has long been a concern that is no longer silent.

The hackers’ money attacks have claimed more than 1,000 lives since January, according to the FBI, and netted the group a whopping $150 million in profits.

Such payouts make Contin the most expensive computer virus ever recorded, according to DASH. With the reward they offered, the United States demonstrated its level of commitment to protecting victims around the world from exploitation by cybercriminals, the statement said.

Officially, Costa Rica refused to pay the hackers who forced the country to declare a national emergency after Conti’s knee-jerk attack, which had managed to identify flaws in the country’s public cyber security infrastructure.

Several government agencies were blocked for almost a month, and a number of digital platforms, including the Ministry of Finance and Virtual Tax Administration, which play a key role in tax collection and payment of salaries, suffered a similar fate.

Conti claimed responsibility for the attack and demanded a $10 million ransom not to release the stolen information.

The impasse caused delays in the payment of salaries. Conti is an extremely harmful virus because of the speed with which it encrypts data and spreads to other systems.

It was first reported in 2020 and is believed to be run by a Russian-based cybercrime group using the alias Wizard Spider.

Costa Rica became the first country to declare a state of emergency due to cyberattacks, but many security experts expressed early fears that it would not be the only one, as cybercriminals are targeting so-called “soft targets” in public infrastructure, including hospitals, trains and schools, in an activity that, with 150 million dollars collected so far, is quite profitable for them.

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