Every organization that suffers a serious ransomware attack faces years of financial pain and reputational damage, or at least this is what we’re often told. While it’s true that the short-term costs of ransomware can be steep, there is less evidence about the longer-term costs that might follow behind. One measure is the effect on […]

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 […]

What effect did last year’s high-profile police disruption of the world’s two foremost ransomware groups have on the wider criminal industry surrounding them? It’s been an open question ever since the infrastructure of ALPHV /BlackCat was targeted in December 2023, followed a few weeks later by a similar action against LockBit.  Eventually security companies, that […]

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 […]