Turns out the fastest way to get a company to consider paying a ransom isn’t calling the CEO – it’s targeting the 46-year-old IT manager.
That’s according to Zscaler, whose ThreatLabz researchers tracked 351 victims across 334 organizations caught up in a single ransomware campaign over the course of a month.
The data suggests today’s ransomware crews have become oddly specific about their preferred victim profile: nearly two-thirds of victims held manager-level titles or above, the average victim was a 46-year-old Gen Xer, and three-quarters worked in accounting and finance, sales, operations, HR, or marketing. Half worked in the industrial or IT sectors.
Read more…
Source: The Register News
Sign up for the Cyber Security Review Newsletter
The latest cyber security news and insights delivered right to your inbox
Related:
- Citrix gives NetScaler admins another critical reason to patch
October 9, 2026
Citrix is urging customers to patch another critical NetScaler vulnerability after weeks of disclosures involving actively exploited flaws. CVE-2026-107406 affects NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway and can lead to remote code execution (RCE) or denial of service (DoS). It carries a CVSS v4.0 score of 9.5. The affected configurations depend on the software version. Older builds are ...
- Shai-Hulud worm makes jump to AI infrastructure with Tensorlake compromise
October 8, 2026
The credential-hijacking Shai-Hulud worm has struck again, this time burrowing its way into a popular AI agent platform SDK. Multiple security researchers reported Thursday that they had detected Shai-Hulud infection in a recent release of the npm package for version 0.5.144 of Tensorlake’s SDK. That package has somewhere in the neighborhood of 12,000 downloads per week, ...
- Attackers uses poem to infect thousands of servers with malware
October 8, 2026
Somewhere in the trackless wastes of cyberspace, a digital Robert Langdon is decoding an ancient poem to find the location of his masters and receive instructions on his next steps. I might be exaggerating a bit, but this is the gist of a rather bizarre story on cyberattacks and cryptocurrency mining. Cybersecurity researchers from Lumen’s Black ...
- Attackers hijack country-code domains to impersonate Google and other services
October 8, 2026
According to Google, attackers compromised infrastructure behind three country-code domain namespaces—.gh (Ghana), .sl (Sierra Leone), and .as (American Samoa)—and used it to obtain unauthorized HTTPS certificates for Google domains and other organizations. These domain endings aren’t limited to sites serving those countries, so the risk can extend to users elsewhere. This wasn’t a break in encryption, ...
- Update Chrome and ChromeOS to fix critical security issues
October 7, 2026
Google has released updates for the Chrome browser and the ChromeOS operating system. On October 6, Google released a Stable Channel Update for Desktop. This is the most important one for desktop users. It brings Chrome to version 155.0.8059.39 for Linux and versions 154.0.8037.39/.40 for Windows and Mac. The update includes 247 security fixes including four rated Critical. On the same ...
- Blinder Tunnel Campaign Targets Iraqi Infrastructure
October 6, 2026
Palo Alto Unit 42 discovered that an Iranian state-aligned threat actor has been masquerading as the Dubai Airports IT department to deliver trojanized coding challenges to high-value targets. Unit 42 tracks the activity as CL-STA-1178. This activity includes a campaign they call “Blinder Tunnel,” that targeted Iraqi critical infrastructure in March 2026, following infrastructure staging ...