Ransomware encrypts or steals data to disrupt operations and extort victims, making backups, access controls, and incident response essential.
Search across headline titles and summaries.
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.
While several cybercrime groups have embraced "EDR killers," researchers say the deep knowledge and technical skills demonstrated by Crypto24 signify a dangerous escalation.
DPRK hackers are throwing every kind of malware at the wall and seeing what sticks, deploying stealers, backdoors, and ransomware all at once.
The first documented deployment of the novel malware in a campaign against the Middle Eastern public sector and aviation industry may be tied to China's state-sponsored actor Earth Baxia.
A swarm of US agencies joined with international partners to take down servers and domains and seize more than $1 million associated with BlackSuit (Royal) ransomware operations, a group that has been a chronic, persistent threat against critical infrastructure.
REvil affiliate Yaroslav Vasinskyi, who was convicted last year for his role in the 2021 Kaseya ransomware supply chain attack, said the Russian government was instrumental to the attack's execution.