Mexico’s Economy Ministry Suffers Cyber-attack At Weekend

The Mexican government has reportedly said it detected a cyberattack on some of its servers on Sunday at its economy ministry.

According to Reuters, Mexico’s economy ministry did not consider sensitive information to have been compromised, and it has subsequently beefed up safety measures.

This is reportedly the second high-profile cyberattack on the Mexican government after hackers demanded $5 million in bitcoin from national oil company Pemex last November. In 2018 hackers made off with hundreds of millions of pesos from Mexican banks using the country’s domestic electronic transfer system.

Government attack

In this latest attack, Internet Service Providers in the country were asked to temporarily isolate networks and servers, the ministry was quoted by Reuters as saying on Monday.

The ministry also reportedly said that the processing of some forms would be temporarily suspended to protect their legal status.

“Following an extensive revision, some of the ministry’s servers have been identified as affected, mostly email and archive servers,” the ministry reportedly stated.

“The ministry’s sensitive information as well as that of its users is not considered compromised,” it added.

A security expert said that firms need to be up front about cyberattacks and not be scared of the public relation implications of such attacks.

“Most organisations are frightened of a PR disaster, so they tend to keep cyber attacks under wraps where they can,” said Jake Moore, cybersecurity specialist at ESET.

“My view is that we need to be more open about these attacks, as they clearly aren’t going away, and we need to work more closely together to reduce the threat,” said Moore. “It is always worth owning up to an attack as other organisations may be able to offer help or point you in the right direction.”

“Seemingly here, the attackers have come back for round two, which tends to be the case when victims get placed on a suckers list,” he concluded.

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