Ransomware gangs ask for seconds from victims who paid

In the past 12 months, the number of ransomware attacks saw a 64% uptick compared with the previous year, with most of these costly attacks targeting businesses, according to a new study from Barracuda.

Attacks on corporations, including infrastructure, travel, financial services, and other businesses accounted for more than half of all attacks (57%) between August 2020 and July 2021 — a 39% increase since last year.

Municipalities are the second most attractive target for ransomware hackers (16%), followed closely by education (13%) and healthcare (13%).

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While results show that cybercriminals are still heavily focused on organisations based in the United States (44%), researchers noted that ransomware is a pervasive issue across the globe with 30% of attacks targeting organisations in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), 11% targeting Asia-Pacific countries, 10% in South America and 8% in Canada and Mexico.

And according to Barracuda researchers, these attacks are becoming even more deadly as cybercriminals level-up their tactics and attack patterns, and with it, their ransom payment demands. Today, the average ransom ask per incident is over US$10 million, with only 18% asking for less, and a huge 30% asking for more than $30 million per incident.

The analysis also revealed that many of these attacks are being led by a handful of high-profile ransomware gangs, including Revil, which was responsible for 19% of attacks, and DarkSide (8%).

Barracuda found that cybercriminals now use phishing attacks to steal credentials before using them to compromise the victim’s web applications — such as web portals or software-as-a-service (SaaS) apps — to introduce ransomware and other malware onto the victim’s system, infecting the network as well other users of the application.

Barracuda also saw a rise in hackers using double extortion schemes, where after stealing sensitive data from their victims, they demand payment in exchange for promising not to publish or sell the data to other criminals. 

Since criminals cannot be trusted, victims who pay are often contacted several months later and asked for another payment to keep the stolen data secret. Some ransomware criminals will accept payment but sell the data anyway.

“Ransomware is an issue which is not going away anytime soon, and can affect businesses of all sizes, as attackers often start with small organisations that are connected to the larger targets and then work their way up towards bigger paydays in the future,” said Mark Lukie, systems engineer manager at Barracuda Asia-Pacific.

To safeguard against attacks, Barracuda recommends implementing watertight security solutions to secure web applications; taking a zero-trust approach to secure access and endpoint security, backing up data and enabling a secure data protection solution to recover critical data in the worst-case-scenario.