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HomeNewsPakistani Latest NewsWhy Hackers Have Targeted K-Electric Website with Ransomware

Why Hackers Have Targeted K-Electric Website with Ransomware

On Monday 7th September, the website of K-Electric was hacked: To be specific, the hackers got control of the IT and billing system of the company due to which the IT system couldn’t generate and deliver electricity bill to the users.

The hackers’ main motive was to get ransom money from the company: They demanded cryptocurrency in figures (382.81790000) BTC as ransom money.

They also imposed a threat of publicizing the stolen website’s data and making the ransom twice of what it is now, if the company didn’t pay the money as demanded.

K-Electric is one of the biggest power distributors in Pakistan. It also enjoys a monopoly in Karachi, a city that has a population of almost 20 million people.

Why hackers targeted K-Electric’s IT system?

Allegedly, the reason of K-Electric becoming a victim of cyber-attack might be associated with the massive power cuts caused by the company a few months back. The citizens of Karachi were not happy with the electricity services. The company received great deal of criticism on behalf of public. They paid the bills and yet did not get the services they were promised. In last couple of months massive power cuts had irked the consumers who upon filing a complaint via social media would receive an answer “responded in DMs” and nothing would be done to emancipate them from suffering.

It is not for the first time that any public utility provider has become the victim of cyber attack. For instance the federal Government apps were recently hacked by Indians. Now, K-Electric is hacked supposedly by a hacker group.

What does Cyber-attacks and ransom infer?

Evidently, cyber-attacks refer to those crimes which are done through the internet by alleged hackers. Usually, Cyber-attacks are done by corporate hackers who target corporations and companies for ransom and other sorts of advantages by assuming control of their IT systems.  The last couple of years of witnessed increase in the number of cyberattacks. One of the popular attack of such nature was Wanna Cry ransomware that spread across the globe and jeopardized the data of millions of users.

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