Tag Archive for: paid

Victims complain they haven’t been paid

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Victims of the $200 million BitMart hack say that five weeks have passed since the crypto exchange vowed to return their money, but many still haven’t seen a dime.

“I’m not one to bitch and moan a lot,” said Paul DeLong, a business owner in Austin. “BitMart, from a communication perspective, they said that they were going to give us more updates. We have not received any updates at all.”

DeLong says he has reached out to the exchange multiple times, and each time, he’s received a canned response from a bot to inform him that BitMart and their attorneys are “working on it.”

In early December, BitMart wrote in an official statement that it would use its own money to reimburse victims of the large-scale security breach, which the exchange blamed on a stolen private key.

But users are getting restless waiting for BitMart to make good on its promise.

CNBC spoke to multiple BitMart users who were targets of the attack, some of whom face total financial ruin if their funds aren’t retrieved.

“Whether it’s $20, $500, $10,000, it doesn’t matter, just communicate back to us, and let us know,” said DeLong.

Many of the victims lost a particular token known as safemoon, which is a cryptocurrency token built on the Binance Smart Chain blockchain. The coin saw a massive run-up in the second quarter of 2021 after a slew of celebrity endorsements from the likes of rapper Lil Yachty and YouTuber Jake Paul.

CNBC reached out to ask whether BitMart still planned to make good on its promise to reimburse victims. The email address of BitMart CEO Sheldon Xia, which he lists on his unverified Twitter profile, bounced back, just as it did when CNBC first reached out to Xia in early December.

A spokesperson replied, “We will support all user withdrawals. We’re also talking to multiple project teams to confirm the most reasonable solutions such as token swaps. Any further updates will be announced on our official website.” The company did not respond to more detailed questions.

Victims plead for transparency

CNBC talked to more than a dozen BitMart users personally affected by the breach. One common theme across many of these conversations was a desire for transparency. The shared feeling was that bad news was…

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OTTAWA FRENCH SCHOOL BOARD: Ransom paid to hackers who stole data on employees, parents and students

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Ottawa’s French public school board says it has paid a ransom to the hackers who breached its computer system and stole files that included personal information on employees, parents and students.

The Conseil des écoles publiques de l’Est de l’Ontario has employed cyber security experts to investigate the data breach, the board said in a news release Tuesday.

The board discovered on Oct. 18 that “unknown actors” had gained access to the board’s computer network and took files stored on the server in the main office, said the release.

The board made a payment to the cyber thieves and was told the data had been deleted.

About 75 gigabytes of data was stolen, most of it internal employment and administration issues, said the board. However, the data also included social insurance numbers, bank account numbers, credit card numbers and dates of birth.

Anyone employed by the board after 2000 may have had personal information stored on the server from which the files were stolen, said the release.

The board said it will write to all employees whose personal data may have been compromised within the week and also provide them a free credit monitoring service for two years.

A “smaller number” of current and former students and parents may also have been affected, and will be contacted, said the release.

The release apologized for the incident, saying administrators are taking steps to improve the security of their computer network.

The incident has been reported to police and the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario.

The release from the board did not say how much ransom money was paid to the cyber hackers.

The board paid the ransom because it was the best chance to secure the data, according to an information webpage the board has set up about the cyber hack. The board does not have proof the hackers destroyed the files after receiving the money, but there is no reason to suspect they did not, said the post.

The board began the “network containment” a few hours after the breach was detected on Oct. 18 and since then has spent time trying to determine what data was taken and analyzing the situation, according…

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Salisbury Bancorp : What To Do If You’ve Unwittingly Paid a Scammer

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What To Do If You’ve Unwittingly Paid a Scammer

August 18, 2021

Every day, in spite of their best intentions, people get taken in by scammers. A moment of inattention or an utterly convincing story, and you’re suddenly on the hook for real money. Worse, scammers are good at convincing you to pay in ways that give them fast access to your funds, and make it hard to get your money back.

But, according to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the situation is not always hopeless. Here are some options you might try. With any of them, the sooner you act, the better.

Credit or debit card
This is your ‘best case scenario,’ since many credit card companies will reimburse you for suspected fraud. Contact your credit card company or bank immediately, tell them what happened, and ask for a ‘chargeback’ to reverse the charges.

Gift card, prepaid card, or cash reload card
Contact the company that issued the card and tell them you paid a scammer with the card. Ask if they can refund your money. If the scammer hasn’t already used the card, you may get lucky, so the sooner you contact them, the better your chances.

Wire transfer
If you wired money through a company such as Western Union or MoneyGram, contact the company immediately to report the fraud and file a complaint. You can call MoneyGram’s complaint department at 1-800-MONEYGRAM (800.666.3947), and Western Union’s at 800.325.6000. Although it’s unlikely to happen, you should ask for the wire transfer to be reversed.

Money transfer app
Online peer-to-peer (P2P) payment systems such as Venmo, PayPal and WePay are convenient – and instantaneous. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to get your money back. Contact the company behind the app, but if the app is linked to a credit card or debit card, contact your credit card company or bank first.

Remote access
If you were taken in by a tech support scam and gave the scammer remote access to your computer, you should immediately update your computer’s security software. Then run a scan and delete anything it identifies as a problem.

Username/password…

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Repeat ransomware attacks hit 80% of victims who paid ransoms

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Organizations that pay up after a ransomware attack incur a high probability of a second attack.

New research from endpoint security vendor Cybereason examined the short and long-term impacts ransomware has on businesses through a survey of 1,263 infosec professionals from the U.S., United Kingdom, Spain, Germany, France, United Arab Emirates and Singapore. One of the most significant findings of the survey was that 80% of organizations that paid ransom demands experienced a second attack.

To make matters worse, of those who did get attacked again, nearly half said they believed it was at the hands of the same attackers, while just 34% said they believed the second attack was perpetrated by a different set of threat actors.

Additionally, paying does not guarantee operations will go back to normal, according to the Cybereason report. Of those surveyed, 46% regained access to their data following payment, but some or all of the data was corrupted. And 25% of respondents said a ransomware attack led to their organization closing down.

Cybereason’s report presents troubling data around the growing threat of repeat attacks. Though 80% is higher than Cybereason co-founder and CTO Yonatan Striem-Amit expected, he said it was not that surprising. The reason for the remarkably high percentage is that when businesses make the choice to pay the ransom, they may be solving an immediate problem, Striem-Amit said. But they are also announcing their willingness to pay potentially large sums of money to resolve a crisis.

Striem-Amit said cybercriminals have gotten better at identifying would-be targets, and the larger ransomware groups are specializing in big game hunting — going after major multinational corporations with targeted intrusion techniques. The problem has become so bad that the White House recently issued a ransomware directive just for businesses.

“When victims are paying, they’re putting a sign to attackers: we’re open for business,” he said. “The criminals then attack these victims again before they have a chance to ramp up their security practices.”

Repeat attack causes

Cybereason isn’t the only vendor to observe the trend of organizations being attacked multiple…

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