Security researchers from Trend Micro estimate that the damage caused by ransomware in the first half of this year equals about 209 US dollars. The number of newly ransomware families have nearly doubled.
Ransomware Damages Cause Significant Financial Losses
Experts from Trend Micro have published a report that showcases the evolution of ransomware families in the first half of 2016. The report shows that the number of ransomware families has nearly doubled in comparison to last year. The 79 newly discovered families and all known old variants of ransomware resulted in losses numbering 209 million dollars.
The research shows that almost 80 million threats of Trend Micro’s customers and the majority of them are distributed via spam email campaigns. The more sophisticated ransomware exhibit advanced feature sets. Affected victims that do not have secure backups of their sensitive data in some cases pay the ransom fees to restore access to their user data. The financial losses add up, and ransomware creation and distribution has grown to become one of the leading causes of cyber attacks worldwide.
Trend Micro reports that more than half of the new ransomware variants are designed for big corporations. Big businesses should be careful when facing malware that affects software vulnerabilities. A notable example of damaging variants includes CRYPSAM which targets unpatched servers using a Java-based vulnerability. CRYPRADAM and KIMCIL are other types of malware that are designed against website hosting providers.
Ransomware has grown to become one of the major security concerns among cyber security experts. As their level of sophistication continues to rise, so are the number of attacks going to propagate across the Web. Trend Micro’s report raises serious concerns about the second half of 2016 when more threats are expected to emerge.
You can read the full report from their website.
