The Ministry of Public Security yesterday issued a press release from its Computer Incident Response Team on a malicious software attack that has surged in recent weeks and one government agency here has been affected
The Guyana National Computer Incident Response Team (GNCIRT) said it wished to alert the general public of the sudden surge in ransomware attacks being experienced worldwide. It said that security researchers are reporting that ransomware attacks have increased nine-fold in a two-week period. Paraguay has recently experienced a ransomware campaign against its citizens. GNCIRT said it has had one recent report of ransomware that infected several computers at a prominent government agency in Guyana and caused irreparable damage to important data files and inconvenience to users. Given the worldwide trend, GNCIRT says it has reason to believe that Guyanese users, especially organisations and businesses processing financial transactions via email, are at high risk.
It explained that Ransomware is a type of malicious software that encrypts data files and demands payment in return for the key to decrypt files. GNCIRT advised that a payment should never be made as there is no guarantee that the attackers will provide the decryption key. Instead, all
