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Cyber Risks · Unit 42 Palo Alto Networks

Ransomware Is Not a “Malware Problem” – It's a Criminal Business Model

Summary: Unit 42 published a paper describing ransomware as a criminal business model that is largely victim agnostic, spanning the globe and affecting all major industry verticals, from small organizations to large enterprises and individual home users. The paper says criminals perfected the key components of these attacks over the last three years, producing an explosion of new malware families, and it notes most single-system attacks charge $200 to $500 while ransoms paid in 2016 hospital attacks exceeded $10,000.

Why it matters: Unit 42 frames ransomware as a business that scales across any target, and the price is set by what the attacker judges you can pay - hospitals paid over $10,000 in 2016 while single-system victims paid $200 to $500. The SamSa malware has already been identified in the wild, encrypting high-value files, databases, and backup systems in one pass.

Read the original at Unit 42 Palo Alto Networks ↗

Topics
Malware
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