Costa Rica declares national emergency after ransomware attacks on government agencies
In 2022, multiple Costa Rican government agencies were hit by ransomware attacks that disrupted public services and contributed to the government declaring a national emergency. U.S. State Department reward announcements referenced the Conti ransomware group in connection with attacks affecting Costa Rica. News reporting described significant disruption to government functions and highlighted broader economic and operational impacts.
First reported April 18, 2022Ransomwaremed overall confidence
T1486: The events are described as ransomware attacks causing service disruption and extortion pressure.
Mitigations
Now
Maintain offline/immutable backups and regularly test restoresEnables recovery without paying ransom and reduces business downtime when systems are encrypted or wiped.
Soon
Segment networks and restrict administrative privilegesSlows attacker movement and limits the blast radius of ransomware deployment across the enterprise.
Later
Harden endpoints/servers with EDR and restrict remote admin toolsImproves detection and blocking of ransomware behaviors and common lateral-movement mechanisms used to deploy payloads.
Detection ideas
Detect mass file encryption or destructive file operations
Alert on rapid renames/overwrites across many directories, creation of ransom notes, and high-entropy writes by unfamiliar processes.
Data sources: EDR telemetry, File integrity monitoring, Windows Security Event Logs
Detect lateral movement and remote execution used for ransomware deployment
Look for PsExec/SMB service creation, remote scheduled tasks, or WMIC usage followed by execution of the same binary on multiple hosts.
Data sources: EDR telemetry, Windows Security Event Logs, Network flow logs
