United States authorities said that the US and European governments will coordinate in the fight against ransomware attacks, which have increased in number and are happening across Europe and North America during recent years. It was informed that the US had established a new ransomware task force to tackle the ransomware cases in future. The homeland Security officials claimed to diagnose the vulnerabilities and will share these to their partners to help overcome the looming threat to critical infrastructure, public and private entities. The US authorities met with the European home affairs Minister in Lisbon and discussed the scope and procedure of mutual cooperation between them. Both EU and the US charted out a strategy to implement law enforcement measures, raising public awareness to protect networks as well as the risk of paying responsible criminals by encouraging states to take active measures to arrest the criminals and extradite or effectively prosecute them within their territory. There had been numerous incidents of ransomware attacks in which private businesses had paid huge amounts to the hackers as a ransom to get access to their networks to resume their operations in a bid to avoid further loss of their businesses. The American government failed to track down the hackers so far and accused Russian-based cybercriminal groups for the attacks. Whereas Russia has denied its involvement in these ransomware attacks. In fact, such accusations are denials that do not lessen the severity of the problem. The problem is very grave in nature and as it has been witnessed through recent cases, the attackers still do not want to attack highly sensitive strategic and nuclear assets of any country otherwise the whole world can plunge into the crisis. The US-EU Collaboration for taking the culprits on task is a good step in the right direction. Presently no country is safe from these hackers and it is not the problem of a single nation but the whole world is equally exposed to such attacks. It is suggestible that this bilateral cooperation between US and EU must be transformed into an International platform to combat this universal threat in the coming days.Representative of SECP were included in the Inquiry Commissions that probed the sugar and wheat shortages scams and they gave valuable input for the recommendation in the commission report.
