The U.S. Department of the Treasury reportedly plans to introduce new sanctions, rules, and guidelines related to ransomware payments in the coming weeks as part of the federal government’s continued efforts to combat those attacks.
The Wall Street Journal reported that the DOT “plans to impose the sanctions as soon as next week,” according to its anonymous sources, and that “expected new anti-money-laundering and terror-finance rules will seek to limit the use of cryptocurrency as a payment mechanism in ransomware attacks and other illicit activities” are set to arrive later this year.
These new sanctions and rules don’t appear to be meant for the cryptocurrency payment industry writ large. Instead they’re supposed to target specific individuals, the Journal said, with the hope of deterring others from having anything to do with ransomware. But the exact method of choosing who to sanction and how to enforce those sanctions wasn’t revealed.
The new guidelines are expected to echo the advice given to many ransomware victims: don’t pay the ransom. There’s no guarantee that paying the ransom will restore access to affected files. Even if it does, paying the ransom suggests that an organization doesn’t have any other way to respond to ransomware, which could attract the attention of other attackers.
These sanctions, rules, and guidelines would follow a resurgence in public awareness of ransomware attacks. Recent operations have targeted video game companies such as CD Projekt Red and Capcom; manufacturers like Gigabyte, Acer, and Garmin; and public infrastructure such as schools, healthcare providers, and pipeline operators.
Ransomware attacks have also specifically targeted the U.S. government, most recently via the SolarWinds hack of 2020. (Or 2019, according to the company’s CEO.) Many of these operations have been attributed to hackers in Russia, sometimes with direct links to the Russian government, sometimes without. Now the U.S. seems to be responding.
