Cyberattacks and putting data as ransom have become more common.
To prepare itself from these kind of attacks, more than 200 municipalities and public organizations in Finland are rehearsing how to respond to possible future cyberattacks. This is done by coordinating a simulated attack dubbed 'TAISTO19' (or 'FIGHT19' in English)
Initiated by the Population Register Centre, a Finnish government agency providing demographic information services, the simulated attacks include scenarios where hacker group demand victims to pay ransoms after a successful cyberattack.
TAISTO19 is Finnish's respond to an attack threat sent on October 10th by activist group calling itself #Tietovuoto321 ('data breach 321').
At that time, 235 public organisations in Finland received received a threat in which the group would carry out cyberattacks if it was not paid a ransom fee in Bitcoin by a certain date.
According to the Population Register Centre on its TAISTO19 web page:
To prepare the municipalities and public organizations. the Population Register Centre said that the organizers made the situations as realistic as possible.
Since the first ultimatum was delivered and the handbook provided, the organizers gradually developed the lead up to the main practice days. The agencies and towns are then having their websites and systems come under simulated attacks.
TAISTO19 may not effectively train the municipalities and public organizations to perfectly deflect such threats in real life, but the aim of this exercise is to make them capable of bolstering their abilities to cope.
The agency's general secretary, Kimmo Rousku, said that participants responded "enthusiastically" to the exercises.
Operating under the Ministry of Finance, the Population Register Centre is also tasked with promoting the digitalization of society and electronic services in Finland.
With cryptocurrencies remaining the hype in the digital economy, many hacker groups demand ransom using those digital coins.
By hacking servers of organizations, hacker groups can steal data, sell them, and/or put them in ransom. Many have fell as victims, and here, Finland wants to come better prepared.
Previously, many organizations, companies and hospitals around the world had experienced ransomware attacks, and many of them opted to pay the hackers to recover their systems.
Just recently, Mexico's oil company Pemex was hit by a ransomware attack that halted its critical operations.
As a result, it was forced to disconnect all of its computers across Mexico, freezing systems such as payments, according to five employees and internal emails. That in order to back up any critical information from hard drives, without the hackers' intervention.
The company had to communicate with employees via mobile messaging service WhatsApp because employees could not open their emails.