Cybercriminals, it is widely observed, have a fondness for weekends. This is not by chance—at weekends organizations are short-staffed, making this the best time to launch a cyberattack. It’s a pattern that played out in a ransomware attack on the Romanian health system on Sunday, Feb. 11, that sent some of the country’s most important […]

Stop us if you’ve heard this one before but ransomware is undergoing another one of its periodic surges. Granted, cybercrime always seems to be on the up—does the media ever report drops in cybercrime?—but this time there’s some hard evidence to back it up. That ransomware activity for 2023 rose was no surprise with the […]

As we regularly observe in this blog, ransomware is devious and endlessly inventive. It’s this ability to find new variations on the same basic extortion template that has made it the most successful commercial form of cybercrime yet invented. Excepting the occasional technical hack (including a talent for spotting weaknesses everyone else has overlooked), most […]

How will the sudden emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) platforms such as ChatGPT influence future ransomware attacks? Right now, there are so many pessimistic answers to this question it can be hard to judge the real-world risk they pose. On the one hand, there’s no doubt that AI can easily be used to improve individual […]

The most extraordinary week in ransomware history anyone can remember began on Feb. 19 with an historic takedown of the infrastructure used by notorious ransomware group, LockBit. Industry watchers were euphoric, almost giddily so. If anything, that might be understating it. Twitter-X was ablaze with congratulations, most of them aimed at Britain’s National Crime Agency […]