Ransomware gangs skip the CEO, head straight for the 40-something IT manager


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:

  • Mythos: An AI tool too powerful for public release

    April 20, 2026

    Anthropic’s most capable model to date, Claude Mythos Preview (aka Mythos), has been described as a “step change” in AI performance, especially on cybersecurity tasks. Anthropic tried to keep Mythos a secret until a few weeks ago, when a data leak revealed the existence of what the company said was its most powerful artificial intelligence to ...

  • Hackers are abusing Apple account notifications to distribute malware, steal money and data

    April 20, 2026

    Scammers have found a way to abuse Apple’s email notification system to deliver phishing messages and trick people into giving away sensitive data and system access. Recently, people started receiving emails from the email.apple.com domain, notifying them of a $899 iPhone purchase via PayPal. The email also shared a phone number for the victims to call, ...

  • NIST changes enrichment process for National Vulnerability Database due to surge in CVE submissions

    April 20, 2026

    The number of reported vulnerabilities has surged so sharply that it forced the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to change how it ‘enriches’ each entry. Until now, NIST would take a basic CVE record and add structured analysis, to make it more useful in the National Vulnerability Database (NVD). That usually includes severity scoring ...

  • UK: Military reviews Army’s use of Chinese technology to make weapons

    April 18, 2026

    The Defence Secretary has ordered an investigation after The Telegraph revealed that the British Army was using Chinese 3D printers to build weapons. Last year, it was revealed that British troops were taking the technology with them into the field and using it to make “suicide drones” for attack missions, despite national security concerns. Army officers said ...

  • Tracking Mirai Variant Nexcorium: A Vulnerability-Driven IoT Botnet Campaign

    April 17, 2026

    IoT devices are increasingly prime targets for large-scale attacks due to their widespread use, lack of patching, and often weak security settings. Threat actors continue exploiting known vulnerabilities to gain initial access and deploy malware that can persist, spread, and cause distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. FortiGuard Labs has analyzed a recent campaign exploiting CVE-2024-3721 in TBK ...

  • Cisco tells Webex users to patch critical security flaws immediately

    April 17, 2026

    Cisco has pushed a new patch to address four critical-severity vulnerabilities plaguing its cloud-based Webex Services platform – and has also warned Wi-Fi access points users of a bug in certain versions of IOS XE that could result in a device bootloop. Webex Services is a platform for communication and collaboration, letting people hold video meetings, ...