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Published on Wednesday,
April 20,
2022
By the A.M. Costa Rica staff and wire services
The Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Technology and Social Security have been the target of cyberattacks.
The first
attack happened on Monday against the
Ministry of Finance, the public
organization in charge of the fiscal
policy on public resources and
collecting taxes.
The ministry confirmed the detection of problems in some of their servers. The situation continues to be addressed by experts. "They have tried to detect and repair the problems that are happening," they said in their statement.
That organization reported that "to allow experts teams to perform deep analysis on their information systems, they have decided to temporarily discontinue some platforms." But they suspended its website (www.hacienda.go.cr ).
Since Monday, taxpayers have not been able to comply with the tax report because the platform created by the ministry, Virtual Tax Administration, known as ATV, was suspended.
The same problem happened with the customs control of imports and exports that are carried out through the Information Technology for Customs Control (TICA) platform.
According to authorities, taxpayers must wait for the page to be restored to do their tax report. "With the goal of not causing damage to taxpayers in the fulfillment of their tax responsibilities, the last day to file and pay taxes, scheduled for this April 18, will be extended to the next business day, counted from the reestablishment of the services, which will be communicated promptly," the ministry said.
The ministry is applying a contingency plan to reduce the affectation on exporters due to the lack of access to the National Customs Service, which can be handled on the TICA platform. Authorities said the platform will be restored once the problems are resolved.
At the close of the edition, the ministry web page was still down.
The second case was the Ministry of Science, Innovation, Technology and Telecommunications (MICITT) website www.micitt.go.cr was taken down on Wednesday, April 13, due to a website maintenance process.
However, on
Monday, one of that site's sub-pages
dedicated to information on Digital
Television got a cyber attack that
modified its content.
That day,
the BetterCyber site published the
hackers threats against this ministry as
well.
About this
issue, the ministry confirmed that "at
7:00 p.m. Monday, the Ministry's Digital
Television subsite suffered a
defacement, which is a modification to
the content of the website."
According to the ministry, that web-page is "a merely informative site on the process of transition to digital television and does not contain sensitive information of any kind."
At the close of the edition, the page of this ministry also continued to be down.
The third public organization to receive a cyberattack was Social Security Tuesday on its Twitter page.
For several hours, the Social Security Twitter account showed content related to the cyberattack on the Ministry of Technology site. 
Social Security confirmed the use of its Twitter account by third parties. "The account was somehow compromised and content was posted that was not from us."
The organization recovered its Twitter account and removed the nonofficial content. The attack did not affect the Social Security website www.ccss.sa.cr.
The cyberattack on both ministries and the Social Security Twitter account were allegedly made by a group of hackers calling themselves Conti.
According to NHS Digital, which is the national provider of information, data and IT systems in the UK, Conti is ransomware that has been under surveillance since 2020.
The ransomware is a type of malware from cryptovirology that threatens to publish the victim's personal data or perpetually block access to it unless a ransom is paid
According to Zdnet, a site specializing in news coverage and analysis on technologies, “many of the notorious cybercriminal ransomware operations, many cybersecurity experts believe that Conti runs out of Russia. In February, members of Conti came out in support of the Russian invasion of Ukraine."
In Costa Rica, the cyberattacks on these three public institutions were attributed to Conti. Because in the no official content displayed on those government sites, they were asking the Ministry of Finance for $10 million in exchange for returning the stolen information.
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