"Crusade" of cyber criminals threatens mammoth geography

Within just a few weeks, a group of cyber criminals managed to throw Costa Rica into disarray.

In April, hackers took over the computer system of the country's finance ministry, demanding millions in ransom to return access, DW reports. But authorities refused to pay. In the weeks that followed, the criminals retaliated by crippling the systems of nearly 30 other government agencies.

People across the Central American country felt the consequences: Tax systems froze. Workers were paid late. Goods for export, including perishable items like fruit, were stuck in customs.

By early May, the situation had become so bad that Costa Rica's newly elected president declared a national emergency. It marked the first time a country had taken that step in response to a cyber incident.

Since then, authorities have managed to restore many of their services. But four months after the first strike, not all the damage caused by the attack has been fixed.

"This is an eye-opening moment for how vulnerable we are to cyber attacks — not just our government or our companies, but our entire society," said Diego Gonzalez, head of the cybersecurity chapter at Costa Rica's Chamber of Information and Communication Technologies.

This month, hackers brought down the court system of the Argentinian city of Cordoba. Last month, attackers knocked out a flood monitoring system in the Indian state of Goa. Earlier this year, an attack caused outages at the central bank of Zambia.  

"There is no doubt that the number of ransomware victims in the Global South is on the rise," said Anna Chung, a threat intelligence researcher at cybersecurity company Palo Alto Networks, pointing to a recent spike in ransomware attacks in Latin America.

Other researchers echoed her warning for regions in Asia and Africa.