Quantum ransomware is one of the types of ransomware that has cyber-attacked the government agency of the Dominican Republic named Instituto Agrario Dominicano. 

The Agency (IAD) is part of the Ministry of Agriculture and is responsible for executing Agrarian Reform programs in the country.

According to some local media of the country, the agency suffered a ransomware attack on August 18th, totally impacting the agency’s operation.

“They ask for more than 600 thousand dollars. We were affected by four physical servers and eight virtual servers; virtually all servers,” IAD Director of Technology Walixson Amaury Nuñez told local media.

Attackers have encrypted several services and workstations, throughout the government agency. 

The National Cybersecurity Center (CNCS), which has been Working with the agency to recover from the attack, says that the IP addresses of the attackers were from the U.S. and Russia.

Dominican Republic’s Instituto Agrario Dominicano has told that the Four physical servers and eight virtual servers have been attacked. 

However, the attackers have asked for more than 600k dollars of ransom from the agency.

Some reports have claimed that the agency was unlikely to pay a ransom as they cannot afford to do so.

The IAD has also told local media that they only had basic security software on their systems, such as antivirus, and they don’t have a dedicated security department.

Attackers have claimed that they have stolen around 1TB of the data of the agency and threatened the agency that they will leak the data if the agency did not pay a ransom amount publicly. 

Quantum is becoming a major player among enterprise-targeting ransomware operations, linked to an attack on PFC that impacted over 650 healthcare organizations.

Quantum is a rebranded version of MountLocker, AstroLocker, and XingLocker. It will be rebranded multiple times under various names. Initially, it was first deployed in attacks starting in September 2020.