The White House held a virtual ransomware summit this week attended by more than 30 nations.
Among those invited included Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, India, Japan, the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom.
The aim of the summit was to find a common response to ransomware tactics that hackers exploit with different cryptocurrency standards. Financial Action Task Force (FATF), which are supposed to protect virtual assets and virtual asset service providers, are not applied worldwide, which allows hackers to profit by transferring cryptocurrency payments to countries with below-average capabilities and/or standards for monitoring questionable transactions.
The summit also called for stricter controls to combat money laundering, rules to better understand financial customers to protect them from illegal activities and international cooperation in the fight against hacking groups.
The group called for consistent implementation of the FATF standards and acknowledged the difficulties some nations might face in creating a framework, managing threat investigation and pledging to cooperate to improve and further strengthen network security, regulation and cyber hygiene among participating countries.
Diplomacy has also been identified as a key element in protecting participating nations to promote rules-based behavior and urge countries to take sensible steps to combat ransomware operations emanating from their territory.