A Nigeria Website Hit by Ransomware, Attacker Demanding over 300K Naira in Bitcoin.

The website of a Nigerian software company hit by a ransomware attack and held hostage by a cybercriminal. The attacker used the ransom message to deface the website requesting payment of 0.016 BTC to a wallet equivalent of over 300K Naira (as at the time of filing this report). As at the time of making this report, the owner has three hours and twenty minutes left to pay or lose the web files.

Our team investigated the history of the wallet address, and found it was newly created as no history of payment received or sent were found. Image below shows that.

History shows the following content has been previously indexed from the website.

Pay the Ransom or Not

Generally, cybercrime experts and authorities advise against paying the ransom for many reasons. Firstly, just because you’ve paid the ransom, it doesn’t mean that you’ll receive a decryption key to unlock your data. Secondly, it might encourage hackers to request larger amounts of money from future victims.

Our team at CyberPlural can help response and prepare plan for incidents like this in the future.