The frequent rise in the price of coins has attracted hackers. More than 40 schools have been blackmailed by hackers for Bitcoin

As the price of the digital currency Bitcoin has risen recently, there have been a series of Bitcoin extortion incidents on Taiwanese campuses, with hackers suspected of invading campus networks and printers and sending threatening letters for extortion. In February, at least 46 schools and 126 IP addresses reported suspected hacker attacks.

According to reports from Taiwan media such as Central News Agency and China Times, statistics from the education authorities show that schools in 19 districts, counties and cities across Taiwan have been attacked by hackers. There is no obvious distribution trend in the affected areas. 59% of the attacked schools are colleges and universities, and 25% are primary and secondary schools. Since some county and city schools have not yet reported to the competent authorities, the number of victim schools may be higher. Hackers have hacked into school network printer devices, and the number of HP (Hewlett-Packard) printers accounts for 73%, followed by EPSON (Epson), accounting for 7%.

Among them, three network printers in elementary and middle schools in Taoyuan City received threatening letters from hackers, demanding that the victim schools pay three bitcoins (about 100,000 New Taiwan dollars), otherwise they would launch an attack on March 1 to paralyze the network. On February 16, a teacher's laboratory printer at National Cheng Kung University suddenly printed out a paper ransom letter with the same content as the elementary school threatening incident. Similar incidents have occurred in many universities one after another.

Network technicians found that the attacked printers did not have permission settings for printing accounts and passwords, and only used the default values. The printers and networks had not been reset for a long time, giving hackers an opportunity to take advantage.

As no serious attacks have been reported, the Taiwan Administration and the Education Department have temporarily classified this extortion incident as a Level 1 cybersecurity incident. The Education Institution Cybersecurity Response Team notified more than 4,000 schools at all levels in Taiwan to increase their vigilance and provided protection suggestions.

In addition, Taiwan's Financial Supervisory Commission and the Taiwan Stock Exchange confirmed that hackers had threatened to extort Bitcoin from several Taiwan securities firms via email. Earlier this month, several securities firms were attacked by distributed denial of service (DDOS), which caused the external web page bandwidth to be fully loaded and the speed of accessing the company's web page to slow down. The technical department has eliminated the problem. This is also the first large-scale hacker attack encountered by Taiwan's securities industry.