After hacker attack
Maastricht University gets ransom back with profit
Three years after a serious hacker attack, Maastricht University is getting back much more money than it paid the criminals. Photo: Jens Kalaene/dpa-Zentralbild/dpa
© dpa-infocom GmbH
That doesn’t happen every day either: Maastricht University is being blackmailed by criminals and paying the ransom – in bitcoins. The educational institution could not have invested its money better.
Three years after a serious hacker attack, Maastricht University is getting back considerably more money than it paid the criminals – around half a million instead of 200,000 euros. The reason for this, in addition to successful police investigations, is the rise in the price of bitcoins. The ransom was paid in cryptocurrency, as the newspaper “de Volkskrant” reported on Saturday. The university confirmed the information at the request of the ANP news agency.
According to this, the trail of bitcoins led the Dutch investigators in 2020 to the digital wallet (cyberwallet) of a man in Ukraine who served the hackers as a money launderer. He found Bitcoins worth 40,000 euros at the time. The legal negotiations about the retransfer from the blocked wallet dragged on until spring 2022 – to the advantage of the university, which now receives the equivalent value, which has increased to almost 500,000 euros.
The money will not flow into the university’s general budget, but will benefit a fund for students in need, a spokesman said. He pointed out that given the cost of updating the IT system, the damage done by the hackers was far greater than the ransom. Around 25,000 students and teachers were affected at the time, and many exam papers were in danger of being lost forever. The manhunt for the hackers and the oversized rest of the ransom bitcoins continues.