Cyber extortion sees huge rise – and small businesses are four times more likely to be hit


Cyber extortion remains the most prominent threat facing businesses of all sizes across all industries, a new report from Orange Cyberdefense has found.

The 2024 Cy-Explorer report worryingly uncovered that the number of victims of cyber extortion scams has grown by 77% year on year. In Q1 of 2024 alone, there were 1,046 organizations that were the victims of double-extortion. The actual figure for victims of ransomware attacks is likely to be much higher – known as the “dark number” – due to the stats on cyber extortion being gathered from observable data on dark web leak sites.

Read more…
Source: MSN News


Sign up for our Newsletter


Related:

  • Hunting MacSync Stealer infrastructure through behavioral pivots

    August 18, 2026

    MacSync Stealer is a macOS-focused information stealer that relies on changing infrastructure to deliver payloads, communicate with compromised devices, and exfiltrate data. Earlier reporting by RST Cloud identified the threat through a limited set of domains and documented rapid command-and-control (C2) replacement after public disclosure. Microsoft Defender Experts expanded that view by correlating recurring endpoints and network behaviors ...

  • ‘Unprecedented’ number of Apple users received recent spyware alert, say investigators

    August 17, 2026

    An unprecedented number of Apple customers have reported receiving a recent threat notification alerting them to suspected spyware attacks targeting their devices, according to experts who investigate these types of incidents. Several people publicly and privately reported receiving Apple’s spyware alerts over the weekend, after Apple sent out a new wave of notifications on Friday alerting customers in ...

  • Operation ASTERIX: Anatomy of a Crypto Fraud Pipeline

    August 17, 2026

    Rapid7 researchers identified an exposed web directory on infrastructure used to support a cryptocurrency fraud operation. The server contained raw phone-number datasets, account-validation tools, enriched lead records, phishing panels, voice-dialing scripts, fake wallet applications, persistence mechanisms, and Telegram exfiltration code. Among the artifacts was evidence that the operator relied on AI coding assistants throughout the ...

  • McDonald’s, Vodafone, TCS, Kyndryl, and others named as researchers point to compromised credentials

    August 17, 2026

    A cybercrook claims to have siphoned millions of employee records from the Microsoft Azure environments of major companies including McDonald’s, Vodafone, Kyndryl, and Tata Consultancy Services. The alleged haul spans nine organizations and is being advertised for sale by a threat actor using the name “TheHatman,” according to research published by Hudson Rock. McDonald’s accounts for the largest ...

  • ChainDrop worm crawls into npm supply chain, evades standard defenses

    August 15, 2026

    A new variant of the Shai-Hulud npm worm has poisoned hundreds of packages while adding propagation techniques that can leave little trace in the corresponding source repositories. In Frank Herbert’s Dune, Shai-Hulud was the name of the giant self-sustaining desert sandworms that moved silently beneath the surface of the planet Arrakis. So it made sense that when ...

  • APT group HoneyMyte upgrades CoolClient

    August 14, 2026

    CoolClient is a backdoor family attributed to the HoneyMyte APT group (also known as Mustang Panda) that has been used in their cyber-espionage campaigns targeting organizations across Asia and Russia. It supports such capabilities as keylogging, clipboard theft, credential harvesting, file management, system reconnaissance, and plugin-based extensions. Since its first public disclosure by Sophos in 2022 and subsequent ...