Jan 30 ·4 min read We’ve seen how ransomware has progressed over the last number of years, so you might be asking, why is that? Why is this old style crime leveraging new technology? Here are some of the reasons.Operate from safe distance It’s easy for the criminals to operate from a safe distance in different countries and regions around the world.They don’t need to be physically be present in the victim’s location.Attack multiple victims They can attack multiple victims simultaneously using the internet.Large victim base There are millions upon millions of users connected to the internet, creating an extensive victim base.Ransom As A Service Now there are services available called ransom as a service, these are the tools provided for criminals to operate the highly automated ransomware services.
This also leads to a wide catchment area so that as many victims as possible can be targeted.Difficult To Trace On the law enforcement side it’s very difficult to trace the source of the technology and also destination of the money, using block chain technology and currency such as bitcoin, it becomes very difficult to follow the money to identify the perpetrators of the crime.
Little downside Finally, given all that we’ve described above, there is little downside for the criminals in undertaking this activity.This is why there has been a total surge in ransomware incidents, new variants coming out on a monthly basis of different types of ransom malware.So how big is the ransomware problem? Very often attacks go unreported to law enforcement and then we cannot measure accurately the number of instances of ransomware that occur.The FBI have launched a public service announcement encouraging victims of ransomware to report the crime.
This is an effort to measure more accurately how widespread the ransom problem is.The FBI estimates that there are over 4000 ransomware attacks daily in the US.Google Trends One way of measuring how popular ransomware is is to look at the Google searches.I ran a search here for the Locky ransomware malware.It’s astonishing, we can see that searches for ransomware and the term Locky were quite low up until January 2016 and then there was a massive surge.This was about the time that Locky started getting distributed across the internet in what’s called exploit kits.
We can see around January 2016 the search term Locky surged and maintained a very common search term for a number of months.Since that time the term ransomware has moved to a new level and is now being searched on a very regular basis.This would indicate that there is many, many people looking for help to deal with ransomware and the Locky malware.
Even without users reporting attacks, we can use statistics, such as this one from Google, to identify that the trend of ransomware is increasing the problem is very widespread.Ransomware families Another metric that’s interesting to look at is the number of different ransomware families that are being identified.In this case a report from the security firm Symantec released figures looking at the volume of new ransomware families identified in the wild .These statistics ran true to April 2016 and we can see continuous climb again in the number of different ransomware families being discovered.
Many people put the reason for the surge in ransomware down to the ability of criminals to collect the ransom money anonymously using crypto-currencies such as Bitcoin.Ransomware Timeline: 2010–2017 F-Secure, published cybersecurity report in early 2017 that’s truly amazing.If you graphed the ransomware malware that has been released over the years, have a look at what things were like back in 2012 and 2013.
There wasn’t too much new malware being released for ransomware.Moving on to 2014, things started to increase a little bit more.
But have a look between 2015 and 2016, everything has surged.The amount of ransomware that is now identified during 2016 in a single month far exceeds what was discovered in previous years.This answers the question very vividly how big the ransomware problem is.It’s a big problem and it’s going to stay around for long time to come yet..