Ransomware isn’t especially complicated to code. These numbers have continued to rise year over year as ransomware attacks grow in sophistication and scale. Within the last year alone, ransomware demands in the United States and Canada tripled in size, from $450,000 to $1.2 million on average. In 2020 alone, the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) estimated that combined losses from ransomware attacks-based on only those reported to the IC3-totaled $30 billion. Given threat actors’ overarching, lucrative success thus far, ransomware attacks have become the most ubiquitous and financially and informationally impactful cyber threat to enterprises and agencies today. Commonly accepted forms of ransomware payment include cryptocurrency, credit card payments, and wire transfers. In the case of most ransomware attacks, the encryption restricts access to critical files, systems, and applications, and refusal or failure to pay the demanded amount may result in permanent blockage of those assets, or leakage of valuable data to the cybercriminal underworld. Ransomware often gets an initial foothold in an organization’s environment when a user engages with a social engineering tactic such as a phishing email or watering hole attack (more on that below).
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Ransomware is a form of malicious software (malware) that leverages data encryption to extort organizations for substantial ransoms that, once paid, will theoretically restore access to and/or unencrypt affected data using a decryption key. With that said, protecting against-and ultimately defeating-ransomware starts with understanding what it is, how and why it’s evolving, and what measures your organization can take to stop it in its tracks.
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Today, the heightening popularity of ransomware and its potential for damage (from school shutdowns to compromised critical infrastructure to interruptions in healthcare delivery) has stirred broader, arguably overdue conversations on how to combat this globally pervasive threat. However, as malicious threat actors grew in sophistication and efficacy and ransoms grew more profitable, ransomware became a more imposing threat to organizations as a whole, with implications reaching beyond information security to governance, operations, finance, customer and public relations, and more. Even as recently as a decade ago, ransomware attacks were considered predominantly to be a cybersecurity problem while most disruptive from a data loss perspective, they didn’t necessarily spell doomsday for targeted businesses.
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