#WeekendWisdom 071 The Rapid Rise of Ransomware

Liam — Fri, 26 Mar 2021 02:15:26 +0000

Welcome to #WeekendWisdom number 71. This week we’re going to talk about the rapid rise of Ransomware.

https://www.l2cybersecurity.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/WeekendWisdom-071-lo.mp4

What’s the story this week?

Earlier this week the FBI’s cyber crime bureau, called IC3, issued their annual report which covered cyber crime in 2020.

Now I was looking at the value of the cyber crimes that have been reported to the FBI and the top two remain the usual suspects of Business Email Compromise or CEO fraud and Confidence or Romance scams. They’re still the top two.

What kind of figures are we looking at?

But I was looking at the figure for Ransomware and I was comparing it back to previous years and you can see here, I have a table which shows that you can see, from the last 2 years that:

The Business Email Compromise/CEO fraud was an increase of 44%, to 1.86 billion dollars.
Confidence/Romance fraud was an increase of 66% to 600 million dollars.
Ransomware, it grew in the last 2 years by over 700%.

Wow! That is a Rapid Rise of Ransomware.

So that is just a massive increase. Now the figure here reported at 29 million isn’t really large. But then again not everybody reports ransomware. Also those figures will not take into account any recovery costs involved in getting back to operation after you’ve paid a ransom or you’ve had a ransomware incident. So there’s a lot more costs that are included in Ransomware that aren’t reported here.

So that’s it for this week. Lets be careful out there and we’ll talk to you again next week.

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