Telecom Namibia Is Affected By Ransomware Targeting Infrastructure.
When Telecom Namibia Declines To Engage In Negotiations, Hackers Post Private Information Online, Making The Southern Africa Telco The Most Recent Organization On The Continent To Have It's Vital Infrastructure Compromised.
Late last year, a major Ransomware Attack on Namibia's telecoms operator made it a public symbol of the convergence of two regional trends: the rise in Ransomware threats and attacks on key infrastructure. Telecom Namibia informed consumers last month that personal data was exposed online as a result of a successful attack by the Ransomware-as-a-service ( RaaS ) company hunters international.
In a statement released on December 16, CEO Stanley Shanapinda stated that the company is Collaborating with law authorities and outside incident responders to find further information. " Initially, it appeared that no sensitive information was compromised, but recent analyses confirmed that some customer data was compromised," he explained. " The threat was contained about three weeks ago and further attacks on our systems and third parties were prevented, [ but exposed information ] was leaked on the dark web... After we refused to negotiate to pay any ransom that may have been demanded."
The fact that the Cybercriminals are targeting Namibia in an effort to make money off of compromised infrastructure systems is not unique. The National Health Laboratory Service ( NHLS ) in South Africa was hit by ransomware in June, which caused system disruptions, erased back ups, and prolonged the recovery period for the Government-run network of medical testing Labs.
Hunters international stole about 18GB of Kenyan Urban Roads Authority ( KURA ) data in July. The Nigerian Computer Emergency Response Team ( Ng CERT ) issued a warning same month, claiming that the Phobos RaaS group had successfully compromised at least one of the critical cloud services used by the Nation's enterprises.
