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:
- MailChimp discloses new breach after employees got hacked
January 18, 2023
Email marketing firm MailChimp suffered another breach after hackers accessed an internal customer support and account administration tool, allowing the threat actors to access the data of 133 customers. MailChimp says the attackers gained access to employee credentials after conducting a social engineering attack on Mailchimp employees and contractors. Read more… Source: Bleeping Computer
- Thousands of Sophos firewalls still vulnerable out there to hijacking
January 18, 2023
More than 4,000 public-facing Sophos firewalls remain vulnerable to a critical remote code execution bug disclosed last year and patched months later, according to security researchers. The flaw, CVE-2022-3236, had already been exploited as a zero-day when Sophos published a security advisory about the vulnerability in September 2022. At the time, the vendor said the hole ...
- Ukraine links data-wiping attack on news agency to Russian hackers
January 18, 2023
The Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA) has linked a destructive malware attack targeting the country’s national news agency (Ukrinform) to Sandworm Russian military hackers. “According to preliminary data, provided by CERT-UA specialists, the attack have caused certain destructive effects on the agency’s information infrastructure, but the threat has been swiftly localized nonetheless,” the State ...
- Gone Phishing: Hunting for Malicious Industrial-Themed Emails to Prevent Operational Technology Compromises
January 17, 2023
Phishing is one of the most common techniques used to deliver malware and gain access to target networks. This is not only because of its simplicity and scalability, but also because of its efficiency in exploiting vulnerabilities in human behavior. Despite the existence of sophisticated detection tooling and security awareness of phishing techniques, defenders across ...
- CISA Releases Four Industrial Control Systems Advisories
January 17, 2023
CISA released four Industrial Control Systems (ICS) advisories on January 17, 2023. These advisories provide timely information about current security issues, vulnerabilities, and exploits surrounding ICS. CISA encourages users and administrators to review the newly released ICS advisories for technical details and mitigations: ICSA-23-017-01 GE Proficy Historian ICSA-23-017-02 Mitsubishi Electric MELSEC iQ-F, iQ-R Series Read more… Source: U.S. Cybersecurity and ...
- Hackers can use GitHub Codespaces to host and deliver malware
January 17, 2023
Researchers have demonstrated how threat actors can abuse the GitHub Codespaces’ port forwarding’ feature to host and distribute malware and malicious scripts. GitHub Codespaces allows developers to deploy cloud-hosted IDE platforms in virtualized containers to write, edit, and test/run code directly within a web browser. Read more… Source: Bleeping Computer
