Dominican Republic’s IAD disrupted by Quantum ransomware attack

It has been revealed that the Dominican Republic’s Instituto Agrario Dominicano (IAD) has suffered a Quantum ransomware attack that encrypted multiple services and workstations throughout the government agency. Reports from local media publicized that the ransomware attack occurred on Thursday 18th of August 2022. 

“They ask for more than 600 thousand dollars. We were affected by four physical servers and eight virtual servers; virtually all servers,” – Walixson Amaury Nuñez, IAD Director of Technology

At this current time, the National Cybersecurity Center (CNCS), which has been assisting the Instituto Agrario Dominicano with recovering from the incident has stated that the IP addresses of the threat actors were from the U.S. and Russia. The Instituto Agrario Dominicano has told local media that they only had basic security software on their systems, such as antivirus, and lack a dedicated security department.

The Quantum ransomware group has claimed to have stolen over 1TB of data and has threatened to release it if IAD did not pay a ransom publicly. It is believed that the initial ransom demand was $650,000.