In a report made by Skybox, a cybersecurity firm, ransomware attacks on corporates and highly sensitive organizations like hospitals and research labs have increased about drastically. Researchers said they’ve recorded a rise of 72% in new samples of file-encrypting malware in the first half of this years.
Ransomware Attacks Rise Sharply Amidst COVID-19 Breakout
The ongoing pandemic has pushed everyone to remain in their respective homes to contain the spread of Coronavirus. This reason was so strong that, many companies have allocated work-from-home methods for their employees to continue the business, and also to aid them. But, with a catch.
Going remote working all in sudden means opening the gates for cyber attackers. Vulnerable systems and employees are often targeted with phishing emails and several types of malwares, to get through their corporate device and spread both horizontally and vertically in their network.
This was explained in the report of Skybox Security, where they reported to have seen about 72% new file-encrypting malware in the first half of this year. Sivan Nir, the team leader at the threat intelligence team at Skybox Security told in the report as,
“We observed 77 ransomware campaigns during the first few months of the pandemic – including several on mission-critical research labs and healthcare companies.”
Further, “The focus and the capability of attackers is clear: they have the means to impart serious financial and reputational harm on organizations.”
The report also mentioned the infamous ReEvil (Sodinokibi) ransomware group, which has been succeeding in file-encrypting and threatening to leak stolen data, giving hope to other low-level cybercriminals to try out such things.
Shifting to work-from-home ideology is a good thing, but without proper defenses isn’t. Corporates of low-level (even higher levels sometimes) aren’t patching this infrastructure with the latest firewalls or leaving the remote ports unattended. Moreover, letting employees work remotely without giving them proper security training is yet another reason hackers are raging against them.
