Simon Batt reports: For a while, ransomware attacks were a hacker’s and scammer’s favorite tool for extracting money from their victims. Now, Microsoft reports that ransomware has now fallen out of favor in place of another kind of attack: cryptojacking. Why Cryptojacking Took the Number One Spot On the Microsoft Security blog, the company details how the…
Category: Commentaries and Analyses
Mean and median ransomware payments up in Q1, but number of victims paying ransom may be decreasing
A new report from Coveware indicates that the average ransom payment increased 43% to $220,298 in Q1 of this year from $154,108 in Q4 of 2020. The median payment in Q1 also increased to $78,398 from $49,450, a 58% increase. That’s the bad news. At the same time average payment was increasing, Coveware notes that…
It: Union of Comuni Colli del Monferrato, cyber attack: hackers publish data
Marco A. De Felice reports: The Avaddon ransomware group publishes screenshots of some data stolen during the cyber attack on the Unione di Comuni Colli del Monferrato, but by mistake it puts the wrong Unione (Unione dei Colli DiVini in the heart of Monferrato) under DDoS attack. Oops? But as Marco notes, that wasn’t the…
Al: Election Data Breach Story Renews Press Freedom Debate in Albania
Mimoza Picari and Keida Kostreci report: First came the news that the personal data of over 900,000 Albanians might be in the hands of party officials. Then came the news that the journalists who broke the story had been ordered by an anti-corruption court to hand over devices, including computers and cellphones. As Albania heads to…
Biden administration unveils plan to defend electric sector from cyberattacks
Shannon Vavra reports: The Biden administration is buckling down on cyber threats to U.S. power infrastructure. The Department of Energy (DOE) announced a 100-day plan to help shore up the U.S. electric power system against cyber threats Tuesday. The plan, rolled out with the private sector and the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency…
How China’s cybercrime underground is making money off big data
Intel 471 writes: Both of these things are true: Big data is big business, and cybercriminals love money. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that these two ideas have blended together in some corners of the cybercrime underground. Through Intel 471’s observation and analysis of open source information and behavior on multiple closed forums, we…