Spanish multinational security firm Prosegur has been hit by Ryuk ransomware, the notorious Trojan virus that encrypts files on a compromised device and typically demands payment in Bitcoin to decrypt them.
As a result of the attack , the company , which reportedly employs 170,000 people across the globe , has shut down its IT network and its employees were reportedly sent home .
The firm, which is credited as being one of the world’s biggest provider of armored vehicles to transport cash, said on Twitter that it had taken “maximum security measures” to avoid propagating the ransomware both internally and externally.
However, Prosegur’s website was up and running at press time.
Ryuk’s reach
This strand of ransomware has been reeking havoc for months.
It’s targeted several US state and local governments, and hospitals . Earlier this month, Hard Fork reported , on how 110 nursing homes in the US had also fallen victim to it.
Although victims are typically advised not to pay the requested ransom , figures from earlier this year suggest that Ryuk had collected more than 705BTC in just five months — approximately worth $3.7 million at the time.
In fact, Ryuk is held responsible for the 90-percent uptick in cryptocurrency ransomware payments.
Robinhood offers traders $15 for going down as markets gained $1.1T
Popular trading app Robinhood has promised to compensate users after its systems went offline just as stock markets rebounded from their worst week since the 2008 financial crisis.
Affected traders may however want to hold off celebrating, as TechCrunch reports that Robinhood is to offer a meagre $15 discount on subscriptions in a bid to make things right.
Robinhood calls this a “first step,” and said it will eventually contact users on a case-by-case basis to explore additional compensation.
“When it comes to your money, issues like this are not acceptable. We realize we let you down, and our team is committed to improving your experience,” Robinhood wrote in an email to users on Tuesday.
Robinhood outages couldn’t have come at a worse time
The app is now back online, but technical errors forced many users to miss potential financial gains all day on Monday, when the Dow rose by 5%, or more than 1,293 points.
This was reportedly the most points gained in a single day ever and the largest percentage bump since March 2009. In total, the market gained $1.1 trillion .
Tuesday morning saw additional downtime between 6AM and 9:30AM PT, just as a Federal Reserve rate cut began to push markets to reverse those gains.
Options traders were likely the most frustrated. The errors meant Robinhood executed options (contracts that give the right but not the obligation to buy or sell a stock at a certain price) as soon as they were at least $0.01 “in the money,” as traders were not able to log into the service to make such decisions themselves.
Options are popular on the r/wallstreetbets subreddit , which was flooded with complaints from disenfranchised Robinhood users.
As for the cause of the downtime, rumors had circulated that an apparent failure to code for the advent of leap years in the Robinhood app.
An official Robinhood Twitter account refuted those claims, instead blaming unprecedented load spurred on by “highly volatile and historic market conditions,” “record volume,” and “record account sign-ups.”
“We now understand the cause of the outage was stress on our infrastructure — which struggled with unprecedented load,” said Robinhood in a blog post . “That in turn led to a ‘thundering herd’ effect — triggering a failure of our DNS system.”
PayPal stock at all-time high after payments surge during coronavirus lockdowns
PayPal stock reached fresh all-time highs just one day after the company boasted new records for daily transaction volume and monthly user signups.
Stock in the San Jose fintech giant jumped more than 13% on Thursday’s market open, briefly hitting $146.90 per share.
$PYPL set its previous price record of $123.91 was set on February 19’s close.
PayPal sees more volume, but way less profit
Despite attracting 7.4 million new accounts last quarter, PayPal proved its not immune to the effects of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic by falling short of earnings expectations.
The company earned a net income of just $84 million — which finance portal MarketWatch noted is way down from the $667 million it posted in 2019’s equivalent quarter.
As for how much money flowed through PayPal: It processed $191 billion in payment volume during Q1 2020, up from $161.5 billion from the previous quarter. PayPal‘s peer-to-peer volume accounted for $56 billion, while Venmo made up $31 billion.
Overall engagement from PayPal users in Austria and Germany reportedly multiplied by two and three times since COVID-19 hit. According CEO Dan Schulman, those numbers have persisted even after lockdown measures have been lifted.
“Our view is, we think we are hitting a tipping point across the world where people are seeing just how simple and easy it is to use digital payments to pay for services,” Schulman told shareholders.
Jack Dorsey’s fintech venture Square is pumping, too
Square, the payments service led by Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, is also making gains off the back of lukewarm quarterly results. $SQ was briefly up more than 12% before falling back below $76 by midday Thursday.
Square’s profit was $539 million, which ZDNet reported is 36% more than the same quarter last year, but well below the $620.3 million projected by Wall Street analysts.
Square‘s gross payment volume hit $25.7 billion for the quarter, which is surely a big number but down almost $3 billion from Q4 2019.
April also marked Square‘s highest monthly volume of direct deposits, which grew by three times over March — a record spurred by the rise of social fundraising, charitable donations, and online tipping, as well as swathes of US users who’d opted to have their coronavirus stimulus checks loaded directly into their Cash App accounts.
The total amount of funds stored in Square accounts now exceeds $1.3 billion, up from $945 million last quarter.
“[…] We believe we’re in a transformational moment right now where new commerce standards, new banking habits, new ways of conducting financial services and commerce are taking shape,” said Square chief financial exec Amrita Ahuja.
So, depending on who you listen to, this is either PayPal‘s “tipping point” or Square‘s “transformational moment,” but either way, the markets love it.
