A group of Pakistani hackers managed to circumvent security and hacked several Costa Rican government websites this Sunday and still on Monday morning.
The group of hackers is called Pak Monster Cyber Thunders and attacked the websites with the domain extension .GO.CR – that is the domains assigned by the Costa Rica domain registrar, NIC.cr, to the government.
Between the attacked sites they are the Municipality of Puntarenas, Municipality of Matina, Municipality of Corridores, Municipality of San Isidro, among others.
In addition, the following websites were affected: Presidential House, Minaet, MEP, MCJ, Ministry of Security and even the OIJ, according to the report of several users.
Local television station Teletica.com confirmed this morning that several websites were still not working. The Q was able to confirm that the Presidencia.go.cr is now working, as well as the Minae.go.cr, Mep.go.cr, the OIJ website Poder-judicial.go.cr/oij and others.
According to the expert in cybersecurity, Esteban Jiménez, this situation is very worrying and shows that “the country does not have an operational incident response center or an organized chain of response nor protocols to help us mitigate an attack on big scale”.
In Costa Rica, the management of government cybersecurity is under the responsibility of the Ministry of Science, Technology and Telecommunications (MICITT), which has not commented on the attack.
“All these domains must be put on primary alert. However, in Costa Rica there is no chain or formal incident control process and the CSIRT-CR is inoperative, so we inform and each institution,” said the expert.
It is presumed that the cyber attack may be due as a response to the departure of the United States from the nuclear agreement and the Israeli attacks.
The threat would have targeted all western countries allied with the United States, including Costa Rica.
