BEIJING (dpa-AFX) - The United States has imposed sanctions on a China-based cybersecurity company and one of its employees for their roles in attacking tens of thousands of firewalls worldwide, including firewalls at U.S. critical infrastructure companies.
The Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctioned Sichuan Silence Information Technology Company, Limited, and one of its researchers, Guan Tianfeng.
Simultaneously, a federal court in Hammond, Indiana, unsealed an indictment Tuesday charging Guan Tianfeng for his involvement in a conspiracy to hack indiscriminately into firewall devices worldwide in 2020 April.
Additionally, the U.S. Department of State has offered up to $10 million under its Rewards for Justice program for providing information about Sichuan Silence or Guan.
According to the Treasury, Between April 22 and 25, 2020, Guan Tianfeng deployed malware to approximately 81,000 firewalls owned by thousands of businesses worldwide. The purpose of the exploit was to use the compromised firewalls to steal data, including usernames and passwords. Guan also attempted to infect the victims' systems with the Ragnarok ransomware variant, which disables anti-virus software and encrypts the computers on a victim's network if they attempt to remedy the compromise.
More than 23,000 of the compromised firewalls were in the United States. Of these firewalls, 36 were protecting U.S. critical infrastructure companies' systems. If any of these victims had failed to patch their systems to mitigate the exploit, or cybersecurity measures had not identified and quickly remedied the intrusion, the potential impact of the Ragnarok ransomware attack could have resulted in serious injury or the loss of human life.
One victim was a U.S. energy company that was actively involved in drilling operations at the time of the compromise. If this compromise had not been detected, and the ransomware attack not been thwarted, it could have caused oil rigs to malfunction potentially causing a significant loss in human life, the U.S. Department of the Treasury said.
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