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.
Canadian said to have turned to a life of cybercrime during pandemic, now must pay the price – literally A LockBit ransomware kingpin has been sentenced to almost four years behind bars and ordered to pay more than CA$860,000 ($635,000, £500,000) in restitution to some of his victims by a Canadian court as he awaits extradition to the US.…
Services slowly coming back online but providers still struggling Change Healthcare is being investigated over the alleged 6 TB data theft by the ALPHV ransomware group as it continues recovery efforts.…
Akira ransomware crooks brag of swiping thousands of ID documents during break-in Over the next few weeks, Nissan Oceania will make contact with around 100,000 people in Australia and New Zealand whose data was pilfered in a December 2023 attack on its systems – perhaps by the Akira ransomware gang.…
Akira ransomware crooks brag of stealing thousands of ID documents during break-in Over the next few weeks, Nissan Oceania will make contact with around 100,000 people in Australia and New Zealand whose data was pilfered in a December 2023 attack on its systems – perhaps by the Akira ransomware gang.…
27,000 individuals had data stolen, which for some included names and social security numbers Stanford University says the cybersecurity incident it dealt with last year was indeed ransomware, which it failed to spot for more than four months.…
War of words wages on between vendors divided Last week, we wrote about how security outfit Rapid7 threw JetBrains, the company behind the popular CI/CD platform TeamCity, under the bus over allegations of silent patching. Now, JetBrains has gone on the offensive.…
US senator calls cyber attack 'inexcusable,' calls for mandatory security rules The Biden administration and US lawmakers are turning up the pressure on UnitedHealth group to ease medical providers' pain after the ransomware attack on Change Healthcare, by expediting payments to hospitals, physicians and pharmacists – among other tactics.…
Five months in and the mammoth post-ransomware recovery has barely begun The British Library says legacy IT is the overwhelming factor delaying efforts to recover from the Rhysida ransomware attack in late 2023.…