It’s no secret that the sums demanded by ransomware extortionists have become more outrageous over the last three years. Ransomware started out as a crime against home users, with ransoms in the tens to hundreds of dollars at most. Then criminals discovered small- and medium-sized businesses, and ransoms shot up into the hundreds of thousands. […]

Using the threat of distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks to pressure victims into paying ransoms appears to be back on the menu for ransomware attackers, new evidence suggests. According to the latest yearly report from security company Radware, the number of attacks using ransomware DDoS (RDoS) in attacks rose markedly during 2021, and were deployed during several […]

How many ransomware threat groups have become household names over the last decade? The answer, surprisingly, is none. Ransomware groups typically spring from nowhere, achieve a degree of notoriety, then disappear just as suddenly, never to be heard of again. None has stuck around long enough to achieve much name recognition. At best, it’s been […]

What’s worse than being hit by a ransomware attack out of the blue? In early December, a Canadian organization discovered the answer in the worst possible way: get ransomed by a second, entirely different attack, on the same day. Being attacked simultaneously by two different ransomware groups is supposed to be rare—or perhaps it’s just […]

For the longest time ransomware attackers stuck to extorting ransoms by encrypting the files of victims in return for an “unlock” key. As backup and disaster recovery made that less effective, around 2019 criminals turned to ‘double’ extortion—the tactic of threatening to publicly release data stolen during attacks. Now it seems ransomware gangs have rapidly […]