As the year 2019 has passed, a London based Insurance Company Beazley Group says that the number of ransomware claims doubled last year as the spike in the malware attacks was more evident in healthcare, professional services, and financial sector.
Till 2016 reports from our insurers on ransomware attacks were infrequent. But the dynamics changed last year as our team got busy in settling more and more claims” said a media briefing made by Beazley’s Data Breach briefing.
Supporting the finding is a new report compiled by Trend Micro which says that a 10-20% increase was witnessed in the ransomware detections the past year. The cyber threat detecting company also came up with the fact that the past year witnessed a rise in ransomware attacks on healthcare companies as it was estimated that more than 700 providers were impacted.
Kaspersky reported even more high figures suggesting a 60% increase in ransomware attacks in 2019 when compared to the previous year. As more than 178 municipalities and 3,000 SMBs were targeted with the file-encrypting malware by hackers.
Barracuda Networks released a similar threat report in Aug’19 saying that a two-thirds increase was witnessed in the spread of ransomware attacks.
Beazley Breach’s report says that in many cases organizations did not become the direct targets, but were impacted when their IT services provider or a 3rd party entity was impacted.
On reason for witnessing the rise in ransomware attacks is because there has been an increase in new ransomware strains which were hard to contain. Moreover, the malware strains which targeted organizations last year were those which were developed with more sophistication in mind like hard to detect, no free decryption tools, having data-stealing capabilities and could wipe off the encrypted data if the victim failed to pay. And once in the network, the ransomware could infect more systems and networks like in a chain syndrome.
Email filters to track down phishing emails, password protectors, multi-factor authentication; employee training to recognized malicious messages and emails are being advised by Cybersecurity experts to avoid the ransomware rise this year.
