One of the Digital Guardian’s Blog stated that in the year 2017 the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Centre (IC3) received 1783 ransomware complaints that cost victims over $2.3 million. Along with it, there were an estimated 184 million ransomware attacks that took place last year. Talking about a recent ransomware attack, in mid-January Communications and Power Industries (CPI) which is known to be the largest U.S. manufacturer of electron was exploited by having its data encrypted and held ransom. About the ransomware attacks, recently Cyble has uncovered several ransomware families which are being tested by cybercriminals frequently.
Ransomware statistics mentioned by Ana Bera in one of her blog’s posted on SAFEATLAST:
- Ransomware cost businesses more than $8 billion in the past year
- The average cost of a ransomware attack on business is $133,000
- The estimated losses in 019 for the healthcare industry are $25 billion
- Ransomware is behind 56% of malware attacks
- 95% of ransomware profits went through the cryptocurrency trading platform
In the recent attack, CPI’s systems were being knocked offline by the cybercriminals and CPI was being asked to pay $500,000 by the hackers in exchange for the decryption key to bring back the encrypted data into its normal form. Overall this entire cyberattack is determined to be a phishing attack and the ransomware quickly spread over the entire CPI network because all the computer systems of CPI resided on the same unsegmented domain. As per Lawrence Livermore, this entire cyberattack took place just because of the domain administrator clicking on the malicious link and then giving the entire control of the system in the hands of hackers. This cyberattack led the company to an ultimate loss of around $500,000 which they paid to the hacker as the ransom. Currently, Cyble is keeping a track record of a large number of data breaches that are taking place all over the globe regularly. For instance, in 2020 alone, Cyble researchers have uncovered over 13,000 unreported data breaches which have affected more than 500 million accounts.
In one of the recent reports by Zack Whittaker, it was being mentioned that just similar to the ransomware attack against CPI, in the same week many other companies such as the Epiq Global (Giant Legal Services Provider) was being knocked offline by a similar ransomware attack, and Visser (Parts manufacturer for Tesla and SpaceX) was being knocked by a new-kind of a data-stealing ransomware attack. As can be noticed that the graph of such ransomware attacks is climbing at a really fast pace, so on the same side companies should start taking care of their cybersecurity part more seriously to tackle such cyberattacks.
About Cyble:
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.
Cyble strives to be a reliable partner/facilitator to its clients allowing them with unprecedented security scoring of suppliers through cyber intelligence sourced from open and closed channels such as OSINT, the dark web and deep web monitoring and passive scanning of internet presence. Furthermore, the intelligence clubbed with machine learning capabilities fused with human analysis also allows clients to gain real-time cyber threat intel and help build better and stronger resilience to cyber breaches and hacks. Due to the nature of the collected data, the company also offer threat intelligence capabilities out-of-box to their subscribers.