Ransomware attacks continued to increase rapidly across 2016.According to Beazley Report, trend was particularly pronounced in the financial services, retail and hospitality sectors. Ransom demands remain small, averaging just $1,000.
New ransomware variants like Zepto, the increased availability of ransomware-as-a-service, and readily available toolkits make it easy for less sophisticated attackers to launch these types of attacks. Most organizations are infected because an employee clicks on a malicious attachment or a bad link in an email message.
Beazley Report says 2016 data breach trends as:
• Ransomware attacks are rising sharply, with more attacks in just July and August of 2016 (52) than Beazley handled in all of 2015 (43). Beazley projects it will respond to 400% more ransomware breaches in 2016 than it did last year.
• The proportion of data breaches deriving from hacking and malware attacks in the first nine months of this year across all industries in Beazley’s portfolio stood at 31%, in line with the percentage of such incidents observed in 2015 (32%).
• Financial institutions are facing a higher proportion of breaches utilizing hacking and malware. Through Q3 of 2015, hacking and malware attacks accounted for 26% of the breaches Beazley handled for financial institutions; in the first nine months of 2016 that rose to 39%.
• Nearly half of 2016 data breaches at higher education institutions (46%) were caused by hacking or malware, up from 38% of industry breaches in the first nine months of 2015.
• Within healthcare organizations, breaches caused by unintended disclosure represented 40% of all industry incidents in 2016 to date, a sharp rise from 28% in the first three quarters of 2015. This is connected to the large amount of information shared between organizations in this industry. 19% of healthcare breaches were caused by hacking or malware in 2016, down from 28% in 2015.
• The rate of hacking and malware in the retail industry remained high, accounting for 53% of all retail data breaches handled by BBR Services in the first nine months of 2016, compared to 51% in 2015.
Here is the Infographic to show you glimpse of Ransomware Attacks 2016
