The US Treasury department decides to sanction a crypto exchange in response to ransomware attacks. The official announcement came Tuesday to mark its very first action against digital currency trading.
Crypto assets are well-known to participate in laundering ransoms on cyberattacks all over the world. A string of attacks already managed to cripple multiple industries. Even several US government agencies reported smaller-scale attacks from time to time.
Suex is the first company to get busted under the alleged participation in potential cyberattacks.
US Treasury reported nearly $400 million of total ransomware payments in 2020 alone. And the totaling amount happens to become more than four times larger in comparison to 2019.
Office of Foreign Assets Control inside the Treasury dept. will design the crypto exchange Suex. It’ll explicitly confront allegedly playing roles in facilitating crypto transactions on ransomware attacks.
It marked Suex to help to facilitate illegal online activities for its personal profits or gains. The Treasury alleged Suex to enable financial transactions to involve illicit means. In fact, the department said eight different ransomware variants are involved in the least.
However, nearly 40% of the company’s confirmed transaction history associates with illegal ransom actors.
Doing business with US entities will become extremely harder for Suex over the new designation. US citizens are specifically banned from financial transactions with sanctioned entities.
The advisory states penalizing for making payments even if the entities are unaware of the facts. Certain activities can lead the citizens to get sued, fined, banned & enforced actions.
Treasury also clarified its responding business guide in the event of any ransomware attacks. Its press release vows to strongly encourage the victims for reporting for full law enforcement cooperation.
But the guidance implies OFAC’s consideration over the victim’s cooperation on cyberattacks.
The press release confirmed the majority of the current crypto activity remains legal. Still, the concern coincides with bad actors’ illegal or illicit exploits. Lawmakers continued to introduce new measures to keep things under control for the extremely hard-to-trace crypto transactions.
