Ransomware encrypts or steals data to disrupt operations and extort victims, making backups, access controls, and incident response essential.
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Background for this topic.
Ransomware is malware used to deny access to systems or data, usually by encrypting files and demanding payment for decryption. Many operations also steal sensitive information and threaten to publish it, so an attack can create both an availability crisis and a privacy or disclosure risk. Initial access may involve phishing, stolen credentials, exposed remote services, or exploitation of unpatched vulnerabilities; attackers may then move through the network before deploying the payload.
Defenses should combine vulnerability management, phishing-resistant authentication where practical, endpoint and network monitoring, and backups that are isolated from routine administrator access and regularly tested for recovery. Organizations should also limit privileges and segment critical systems to reduce the blast radius. An incident requires rapid containment, preservation of forensic evidence, restoration from known-good backups, and assessment of notification, legal, and regulatory obligations. Threat intelligence can help identify relevant criminal infrastructure or tactics, but it does not replace sound access control, patching, detection, and recovery practices.
After being used in Akira and Fog ransomware attacks, a critical Veeam Backup & Replication (VBR) security flaw was also recently exploited to deploy Frag ransomware. [...]
The City of Columbus, Ohio, notified 500,000 individuals that a ransomware gang stole their personal and financial information in a July 2024 cyberattack. [...]
A relatively new ransomware operation named Interlock attacks organizations worldwide, taking the unusual approach of creating an encryptor to target FreeBSD servers. [...]