Companies and Intellectual Property Commission (CIPC), the South African organisation in charge of business registrations and the defence of intellectual property rights, disclosed the ordeal of its cyber security compromise last week.
The regulator in a recent statement claimed that the attempted intrusion may have revealed staff and client personal information.
The South African regulatory agency had earlier disclosed that on February 29th, there had been a cyberattack in its cyberspace, exposing the personal data of both workers and clients.
Significant technical maintenance was carried out by the and temporarily shut down its IT systems to make the required repairs after the attempted intrusion.
After being offline since Wednesday at 2 p.m., the organisation was able to get its website back up and running by 8 a.m. SAST yesterday.
Its call centre and self-help assistance centre were also impacted by the outage.
The exposure of the names, addresses, and contact information of directors, owners, and holders of patents and trademarks is concerning due to the breach.
Affected clients were instructed by CIPC to keep a careful eye on credit card transactions and to approve only legitimate requests.
Regarding the people responsible for this incident, they appear to be playing a high-stakes game by requesting a $100,000 Bitcoin ransom.
The hackers told MyBroadband that they gained access by using an exploit in a system created by software development company Sword South Africa specifically for the CIPC.
They claimed to have been able to access all of the CIPC’s data, including credit card numbers and plain text passwords.
They also have complete access to company registrations thanks to the hack. They may change the records in other ways or add or remove directors as they see fit.
“They tried to cover their tracks when we pointed out the basic security holes. They are reckless with sensitive info,” the group said.
“This incompetence extended to them processing and storing credit cards in the clear.”
They offered private information that MyBroadband would be able to identify as evidence of their claims.
Additionally, they cited a Pastebin article as evidence for their assertion.
The complete names, ID numbers, physical addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, and CIPC passwords of multiple individuals were included in the data sample.