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Now Business Networks are Being Aimed at by Ransomware

The latest trend of ransomware attacks says, one in ten of such cybercriminal activities where CTB-Locker, Locky and like ransomware are involved, targets are business networks.

Chinese hackers responsible for ransomware attacks in the US, investigations showAccording to new Kaspersky Labs report on ransomware, cyber criminals are now shifting their attention to corporate networks because they know crypto-ransomware is extremely effective and working. Further, it added that the number of corporate victims who were targeted by crypto-ransomware had increased significantly. The figures show that 718,000 corporate victims were targeted in the last year compared to 131,000 which were made victim to such attacks in the previous 12 months period.

Earlier, the situation was different altogether, and only individual users were made the victim of crypto-ransomware, while corporate networks were ignored by hackers. However, now the situation has changed, and one in ten of such attacks is targeted at corporate networks.

Statics also shows that almost half of the attacks carried out during 2015 and 2016 used Teslacrypt ransomware, later the Trojan died as its master key was released to the public in May. Second in the chain of ransomware comes CTB-Locker, which also infamous for the same tactic where the attacker will encrypt the victim’s files and demand ransom to be paid in Bitcoin within next 96 hours, and if the victim failed to do so, he would end up getting all his files deleted permanently.

Several other ransomware which caused same problems includes Craki, Shade, CryptoWall, Scatter, Aura, Locky and Mor.

The crypto-ransomware poses more serious threats to corporate networks than individual users and the results could be catastrophic. Konstantin Voronkov, the head of Kaspersky Labs product management said that Crypto-malware are posing serious threats, not only the corporate organization suffers losses for ransom, but the business is also paralyzed during the process of files recovery.

Another report says that hackers are targeting small and medium sized corporate businesses, and it is for the simple reason that they are more likely to pay the ransom quickly to get back online.

The cyber-security giant Kaspersky Labs advised that the corporations should not pay ransom to the hackers because it only encourages them to commit such activities even more. Moreover, as a precaution, the corporations should make backups of their data at regular intervals both locally and on the cloud so that the information could be protected safely at the time of such crisis.