The standard recently reported about two financial institutions in Hong Kong that were inflicted with Bitcoin ransom crime.
As per the information that has been made public, the Bank of China and the bank of East Asia were under attack that also led to some abnormalities in the functioning of their websites. The hackers are suspected to be in operation from some foreign countries threatened to cause greater damage to the bank’s websites if they did not make large sums of bitcoin payments as ransom.
Rather than relenting, the banks reported the case to local police which is currently under investigation by the local police’s cyber security and technology crime bureau. As per the preliminary investigations, the attack has been launched from various locations around the world.
As per the bank’s comments released, they did not see any serious violations made by the hackers to the bank websites. Although Bank of China agrees that its websites were hacked, however, they deny all claims that their customer service was impacted as a result. On the other hand, Bank of East Asia reported that there has been an unusual increase in foot fall on their website following the attack. They also made clear that they did not experience any breach of customer data caused as a result of the hack.
Bitcoin Ransom, not the first time
Bitcoin and ransom have been together in news once before as well. There have been several cases in the past when the digital currencies led crimes were fuelled online. Only recently, American police departments were under attack and the hackers in this demanded Bitcoin as ransom. However, in this case, the ransom amount had to be paid by the police department so that they could regain control of their machines. In the past, even Taylor Swift has been victimized by Dsitributed-Denial-of-service attack in which the hacker got hold of her nude pictures and threatened to release them online if he wasn’t paid in Bitcoin ransom.
Even though there are many alarming news on the internet floating each day about Bitcoin’s likelihood to fuel cyber crime, government still believes that it is safe to use because of its pseudo-anonymity and the fact that it can be traced all the way back to the user! Hence, bitcoin is not as anonymous as it is touted to be by the market.
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