On Jan. 10, Britain’s Royal Mail was hit by a ransomware attack that will probably be used as an example in security conference slide presentations for years to come. On the surface, this was a fairly standard ransomware attack on a large company—in this case, the overseas mail department of a company that delivers around […]

Even by its own grim standards, the last two years have been a remarkable time for the ransomware industry. Incidents have become ever more spectacular, while the ransoms being demanded have grown larger, sometimes to almost incredible levels. Innovations, meanwhile, have come thick and fast, including targeting critical infrastructure on a significant scale and encrypting […]

How do today’s ransomware attackers find a way in? In truth, there are numerous routes, some more obvious than others. The key for ransomware attackers is to find an initial staging post. Often this is an employee—or more specifically, the employee’s network credentials—grabbed after a phishing attack. In other cases, it’s about finding an external […]

On Sept. 6, two Utah-based newspapers reported that their company files had been encrypted and rendered inaccessible, delaying the publishing presses for 24 hours. Days earlier, something similar happened at Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) in Georgia, this time leading to a breach of sensitive student and staff data. In California, it was […]

Discerning trends in ransomware has never been easy, but every now and again something jumps out from the confusion of events that points clearly at trouble ahead. A good current example is the steady rise of the Hive ransomware group, first reported around mid-2021. Since then, there has been a steady stream of attacks attributed […]