Ransomware demands up by 43% so far in 2021, Coveware says
Ransomware hacking groups are getting greedier. The average demand for a digital extortion payment shot up in the first quarter of this year to $220,298, up 43% from the previous quarter, according to a quarterly report from Coveware, a ransomware response firm. The median payment, too, jumped up 58% from from $49,450 to $78,398. The majority of ransomware attacks in the first quarter also involved theft of corporate data, a continuation of a trend of ransomware actors increasingly relying on exfiltration and extortion demands. Seventy-seven percent of ransomware attacks included the threat to publish stolen data in the first quarter of this year, which is up 10% compared to the last quarter of 2020, Coveware found. The report comes as the U.S. government is working to improve law enforcement actions targeting the infrastructure that supports ransomware gangs. In recognition that extortion demands are an increasingly popular approach, the U.S. Department of […]
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