Those spreading Avaddon Ransomware have decided to close down their shutters- all due to a global crackdown initiated by US FBI in association with other law enforcement agencies across the world.
On average the said file-encrypting malware spreading group was demanding $40,000 in exchange for the decryption key. But decided last week that they are going to offer assistance to victims for free.
Security analysts say that Avaddon Ransomware as a service gang decided to cease its operations due to fear of getting caught by law enforcement. Already, the same was witnessed in the case of DarkSide Ransomware spreading gang where the FBI succeeded in ceasing all the main servers related to the gang and also managed to siphon money from the wallets that were extracted by them from victims in cryptocurrency.
Coming to the second news, a study conducted by Censuswide has confirmed that a majority of businesses that fell victim to ransomware are on the verge of getting hit with the same malware for the second time.
It was proved in the study that 80% of organizations that paid ransom were hit again within just 6-8 months. And the bad news is that only 46% of those victims were able to retrieve access to their locked-up data, while others were left helpless- even though they paid the ransom for the 2nd time as well.
For this reason, many security researchers and the FBI along with UK’s NCSC are urging ransomware victims repeatedly not to pay any ransom to hackers as it encourages crime and never assures decryption key for sure after ransom pay.
Third, in the past 6 months, a new ransomware variant dubbed Networm aka N3tw0rm was found targeting companies and educational institutions in Israel. And a news resource Haaretz reports that the attacks were launched by Iranian hackers who were seen masquerading their activities as Russian hackers.
News is out that the Israel-based ransomware gang managed to steal over 110GB from H&M and over 9GB of data from Veritas and demanding over 3BTC to free up the database from malware.
The fourth news that is last, but not the least is about a meeting between US President Joe Biden and Russian leader Vladimir Putin that is said to take place in Geneva, Switzerland on June 16th of this year.
Biden is expected to discuss the constant ransomware threats that are targeting US Critical Infrastructure from the past 9 months and Russia’s intelligence involvement in these attacks.
The discussion might also be led to the point where Biden might corner Putin with the question of how the bitcoin rate surge against the dollar, the pandemic and work from home trend, and Russia’s indulgence in ransomware attacks made the situation worse for America and other nations from West such as Britain.
Hope, the discussion will end up on a peaceful note!
