As most of the Australian organizations are silently paying ransomware payments to get back access to their encrypted data, it has started a vicious cycle that has led the world to a position where it is facing a tsunami of cyber crimes
According to a finding made by Cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike there has been a 60% increase in ransomware attacks on Australian firms in the past one year and the percentage is expected to double or quadruple within next 3 years.
And as per the analysis conducted by the Australian Cyber Security Center (ACSC) there has been an increase in the frequency of attacks and the size of demanded ransoms in the past 6 months.
“That’s alarming! However, many of the organizations operating in Australia remain complacent about the seriousness of the cyber threat and that adds to the ongoing trouble,” said Micheal Sentonas, the CTO of Crowdstrike.
Most of the business heads are in a misconception that they can never be attacked or why the hell the hackers will show interest in their small firm. And that’s completely false, said Mr. Sentonas.
Coming to payments, most organizations are not saying when they were attacked or how much did they pay to free up their databases from malware- all because of the fear of loosing reputation.
This is not only making it difficult for the law enforcement agencies to share information in order to contain or block the crimes in the future. But is also making it difficult for them to track the payments while making a recovery.
In a separate research carried out by Cyber Security Cooperative Research Center, cyber crime has costed the global economy a loss of $1 trillion USD and in the estimated sum, over 37% of it was supposed to be incurred by ransomware attacks.
Researchers from Crowdstrike predict that the ransomware industry is growing and is becoming sophisticated. And so all future attacks will either be hard to predict/investigate or will be difficult to stop/mitigate.
That’s absolutely true….isn’t it?
