RansomWare
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- Last Updated: Sunday, 14 January 2024 17:47
- Published: Thursday, 23 August 2018 15:38
- Hits: 868
Ransomware in 2024
It was still the biggest internet threat to users and continues to approximately double every year.
Recent reports are showing a preference for targeting larger businesses and organisations rather than individual users, probably because they are easier to manage and owners place a much higher value on their data so the rewards are much greater. Also the cost of downtime and effort to recover from backup can be more than just paying up for a quick fix.
The current trend is to not just encrypt ones data, but to download it and threaten to publish the information for anyone to view.
A major incident in 2023 was the Australian consumer finance firm Latitude Group Holdings Ltd where hackers stole nearly 8 million Australian and New Zealand drivers licence numbers in one of the country's biggest confirmed data breaches, requiring them to be re-issued.
A worrying development is that non programmers have been using Chat GP to develop code for this and other malware purposes. While any use of Chat GP for illegal use is prohibited, and mostly blocked, there are ways around this.
It has been estimated that victims of ransomware paid over 1 Billion US dollars in 2016 to recover their data and in future it's expected to be much greater. Are you prepared?
Checkout our page about it and how to avoid becoming a victim and if the worst happens to recover without paying up!