Ransomware Cyber Attacks

While ransomware attacks continue to grow in frequency and ransom demands, the share of victims willing to comply with hackers is steadily declining, making larger firms more attractive targets

India has about 1,500 cooperative and rural regional banks, which largely serve customers in hinterland areas, one-fifth of which were affected by the attack

National Payment Corporation of India, an authority that oversees payment systems, said that it had temporarily isolated C-Edge Technologies from accessing the retail payments system operated by NPCI

Several London hospitals said Tuesday that they had to cancel operations and send patients away because of a cyberattack on a company that supplies pathology laboratory services. The firm, Synnovis, said it had been hit with a ransomware attack. Chief Executive Mark Dollar said the attack has affected all Synnovis IT systems, resulting in interruptions to many of our pathology services. It is still early and we are trying to understand exactly what has happened, he said. The National Health Service said there had been a significant impact at King's College and Guy's and St Thomas' hospital trusts, which between them run several south London hospitals, as well as to clinics and doctors' practices across a swath of the city. A memo to staff said the critical incident had had a major impact on the delivery of services, with blood transfusions particularly affected. NHS England London region said in a statement that it was working urgently to fully understand the impact of the inciden

Police coordinated by the European Union's justice agency have taken down computer networks responsible for spreading ransomware via infected emails, in what they called the biggest ever international operation against the lucrative form of cybercrime. The European Union's judicial cooperation agency, Eurojust, said Thursday that police arrested four high value suspects, took down more than 100 servers and seized control of over 2,000 internet domains. The huge takedown this week involved coordinated raids in Germany, the Netherlands, France, Denmark, Ukraine, the United States and United Kingdom, Eurojust said. The operation followed a massive takedown in 2021 of a botnet called Emotet, Eurojust said. A botnet is a network of hijacked computers typically used for malicious activity. Dutch police said in a statement that the financial damage inflicted by the network on governments, companies and individual users is estimated to run to hundreds of millions of euros (dollars). Milli

Cyber Security in India: A report by Sophos found that 65% of those hit by ransomware were inclined to pay the ransom to recover the data with the average cost for data being $1.35 million

Nearly 64 per cent of Indian organisations surveyed were hit by ransomware attacks in 2023, a latest report by Sophos said on Tuesday, noting that while the attack rates fell year-on-year, the impact on victims actually intensified. The average ransom demand was USD 4.8 million, with 62 per cent of demands exceeding USD 1 million. The median ransom paid was USD 2 million, the report by the global cybersecurity solutions provider said. Put simply, ransomware refers to malicious software or malware that seizes files on a computer, network share, backups, and server, and encrypts them, following which the attacker exhorts the user to cough up money to unlock the files. Typically, ransomware attacks come with a timeline, threatening users that if ransomware demands are not fulfilled, the users will lose files. According to the 'State of Ransomware in India 2024' report by Sophos, there has been a decrease in the rate of ransomware attacks against Indian organisations from the 73 per c

India, which detected over 2 lakh ransomware attacks in 2023, is likely to see similar onslaughts, cyber security firm Kaspersky said on Wednesday. Kaspersky General Manager for South Asia Jaydeep Singh said researches conducted by the firm have shown that India is consistently among the top 12 targeted countries and territories for Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs). "For three years in a row, file encryption has been the top problem faced by enterprises and organisations worldwide and in India. From the basic ransomware attacks like the Wannacry in 2017, we have reached the era of Ransomware 3.0 where we see triple extortion in the form of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS), reselling of data, and public blackmailing. "This form of attack has a wider impact on the financial and reputation aspect of Indian companies," Singh said. Kaspersky claims to have detected over 2 lakh ransomware incidents on businesses in the country in 2023. According to the company, major ransomware gr

Law enforcement from 11 different countries took part in the operation, which seized 11,000 domains used by LockBit and its affiliates to facilitate ransomware, an FBI official said

Sony-owned Insomniac Games' more than 1.3 million files, including game roadmaps, budgets and information about an upcoming "Wolverine" title, have been leaked online by the Rhysida ransomware group

This comes days after HCL Tech crossed the market capitalisation of Rs 4 trillion on the Indian stock exchanges

The 2023 Chief Information Security Officers (CISO) report found that 86% security officers believe generative AI could bridge skill gap in their security teams

India saw a huge surge in ransomware and IoT cyber attacks in the first half of 2023, as criminals shifted to stealthier means of malicious activities, according to a report by SonicWall. While major economies like the US and the UK witnessed a decline in ransomware attacks, India (up 133 per cent) and Germany (52 per cent) are among the countries that saw a huge surge in such attacks, the 2023 SonicWall Mid-Year Cyber Threat Report for the January-June period stated. At the global level, a variety of other attacks have trended up, including cryptojacking (399 per cent), IoT malware (37 per cent) and encrypted threats (22 per cent), the report said. At the global level, there was a decline of 41 per cent in ransomware attacks. Cybercriminals are diversifying and expanding their skill sets to attack critical infrastructure, making the threat landscape even more complex and forcing organizations to reconsider their security needs, the report mentioned. "While India saw a lesser rise

Incidents of ransomware and other cyber attacks should be reported to the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In)

As companies put more effort towards securing their data networks, cyber-attacks are also becoming more sophisticated with time

The personal information of nearly nine million people in the US has been compromised in an apparent ransomware attack on one of the country's largest dental health insurers

About 77 per cent of ransomware attacks against surveyed organisations succeeded in encrypting data, but only 44 per cent paid the ransom to recover their data, the report said

The leaked data includes employees' social security numbers and bank account details

Half of IT professionals surveyed in India believe that security threats are increasing in volume or severity

The Guardian said its systems have been hit by a 'serious IT incident', which appears to be a ransomware attack