In today’s world, the extortion payments made to ruthless cybercrooks are directly motivating the ransomware industry. The research conducted by the CyberEdge group revealed over the last 2 years the percentage of victims paying the ransom amount has drastically increased from 49% to 67%. While the increasing number of victims willing to pay the ransom amount to recover their sensitive and confidential data is making the cybercriminals motivated to launch hacking attacks more often, it is also building up the darkweb market by funding in large amounts For instance, back in the month of June, the University of California paid a ransom amount of $1.14 million to the cybercriminals to get their stolen data back. Not only that, recently Garmin a well-known fitness brand paid millions of dollars to the ransomware group named “WastedLocker” to get their services back online. Talking about numbers, in Q1 2020 the average enterprise ransom payment has increased to $111,605 which is up 33% from Q4 of 2019.
As we all know currently, the entire world is under the stress of the on-going COVID19-pandemic, and due to which the majority of businesses have started to get their employees to work remotely. This situation is highly likely to compromise the organization’s security and become prime targets for cybercriminals. But at all times the organizations should not let the cybercriminals empower them and take advantage of their situation. For instance, recently the Cyble Research Team identified a copy of the chat log which allegedly seems to be the conversation between the CWT travel agency and the cybercriminals. Here, the organization paid $4.5 million as a ransom to get their systems back up running and to get their data back from the cybercriminals. This chat conversation is a clear example showing how the victims of the data breach attacks make cybercriminals their only hope of getting them back on track and let them easily empower them.
Below are the snapshots of the chat conversation between the victim and the cybercriminal.
About Cyble
Cyble is an Atlanta, US-based, global premium cyber-security firm with tools and capabilities to provide near real-time cyber threat intelligence.
Cyble Inc.’s mission is to provide organizations with a real-time view of their supply chain cyber threats and risks. Their SaaS-based solution powered by machine learning and human analysis provides organizations’ insights to cyber threats introduced by suppliers and enables them to respond to them faster and more efficiently.
This monitoring and notification platform give the average consumer insights into their personal cybersecurity issues, allowing them to take action then as needed. It has recently earned accolades from Forbes as being the top 20 cyber-security companies to watch in 2020.