Portugal is the country most attacked by ransomware attacks31st Observer
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United States of America, and Canada are the most United Kingdom countries ransomware, a type of computer attack whose objective is to obtain a financial ransom from victims. The data is advanced by the semi-annual report of “threat intelligence“, from S21sec, a cybersecurity company, which, among 101 countries, places Portugal in 31st place.
Leader of Claranet Portugal: “There are companies with a lot of visibility that were attacked and did not have the importance of Vodafone or Impresa”
According to the same report by the cybersecurity company, one of the main security flaws observed “has the exploitation of existing vulnerabilities in the target infrastructure”. Therefore, Hugo Nunes, responsible for the Intelligence team at S21sec, says that “it is important that companies take this type of threat into account and focus on updating and maintaining their infrastructures”.
THE ransomware,it is finally a business, having over the months accounts improved to a Ransomware-as-a-Service model, where there is a division of expertise from the cybercriminals involved in the attack and the profits adjacent to its success, operators with an optimization of money with the efforts carried out by branches, while they guarantee the infrastructure to support the ‘business’ and are committed to the development and improvement of the applied techniques”, says Hugo Nunes.
In all, in all countries analyzed during the second half of 2012, there were 1,694 victims of ransomware, which, as S21sec explains, “has become one of the types of cyberattacks with the greatest growth and impact”. Of the number of attacks presented, the US was the target of 757. Spain, which comes in eighth place — had 32.
Former coordinator of the National Cybersecurity Center says the attack on Vodafone had “atypical characteristics”
Cases this year, Portugal had more mediatic computer attacks, such as what some suffered with the Impresa group (Sic, Opto, Expresso) in early 2022 or Vodafone and the Germano de Sousa group last week. According to Hugo Nunes, the “telecommunications sector has been one of the hardest hit during the pandemic, from the hoaxes shared on social networks about 5G, to the phishing [mensagens enviadas com o objetivo de ludibriar os destinatários] in which the operators’ customers are enticed with false offers of gigabytes for free because of the coronavirus or contests to win mobile phones”.