According to Kaspersky security researchers, there are thousands of notifications of attacks on major banks located in some African countries, including Ghana.
These hackers are reportedly from Russia and have been known to have targeted the Ghanaian Ministry Of Finance in 2018.
They are known to be responsible for the theft of millions of dollars from banks across the world.
There are two hacking groups identified so far, one is called the Silence Group while the other goes by the name Fxmsp. They reportedly use anti-malware to breach security firewalls of institutions to cash in on them.
According to reports in 2018, the Russian hackers have a track record of selling stolen corporate secrets on underground forums that dates back to at least early 2018.
They have reportedly offered items from the Ghana Ministry of Finance, the Bogota Electronic Government Database, Luxury Hotels Group, Keystone Bank and DeltaWestern Petroleum among others.
According to Kaspersky security researchers who are warning against another wave of attacks in 2020, the hackers operate by beginning with a social engineering scheme that launches their attack mode by sending a phishing e-mail that contains malware to a bank employee.
From there the malware gets inside the banks’ security perimeter and remains quiet for a while, gathering information on the victim organisation by capturing screenshots and making video recordings of the day to day activity on the infected device, learning how things work in the targeted banks.
When the attackers are ready to take action, they activate all capabilities of the malware and cash out using, for example, ATMs. The score sometimes reaches millions of dollars. According to the alert from Kaspersky security researchers, the current wave of attacks were detected in the first week of January 2020 and that the hackers are about to begin the final stage of their operation and cash out the funds