Catalin Cimpanu reports:
.. in a report published today and shared with ZDNet, the security team at KPN, a Dutch telecommunications provider, said it was able to sinkhole and intercept the communications between REvil-infected computers and the REvil ransomware’s command-and-control (C&C) servers.
KPN researchers say this allowed them to obtain unique insights into the operations of the REvil RaaS, such as the number of active infections, the number of infected computers per attack, and even the sum of money (ransom) hackers requested from victims in each recent incident.
As you might expect, the amount of any specific ransom demand was dependent in how far into a network REvil access had successfully reached:
For these 75 REvil samples that appeared to have infected multiple workstations inside a company’s network, the average ransom demand was $470,000 per company, and with many incidents passing the $1 million mark.
Those larger figures are more similar to what Maze Team demands from its victims, where we saw some demands of about $1 million and yet other demands (like Southwire) of about $6 million average.
Read more on ZDNet.
For comparison purposes: a new report from Coveware puts the average cost of a ransomware attack at $84,116, almost double what it had been in Q3 of 2019.