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:
- Meet Mantis – the tiny shrimp that launched 3,000 DDoS attacks
July 15, 2022
The botnet behind the largest-ever HTTPS-based distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attack has been named after a tiny shrimp. Cloudflare said it thwarted the 26 million request per second (rps) attack last month, and we’re told the biz has been tracking the botnet ever since. Now, the internet infrastructure company has given the botnet a name — Mantis — ...
- Attackers scan 1.6 million WordPress sites for vulnerable plugin
July 15, 2022
Security researchers have detected a massive campaign that scanned close to 1.6 million WordPress sites for the presence of a vulnerable plugin that allows uploading files without authentication. The attackers are targeting the Kaswara Modern WPBakery Page Builder, which has been abandoned by its author before receiving a patch for a critical severity flaw tracked as ...
- The industrial internet of things is still a big mess when it comes to security
July 14, 2022
Critical infrastructure is increasingly targeted by cyber criminals – and while those responsible for running industrial networks know that securing operational technology (OT) and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is vital, they’re struggling, resulting in networks being left vulnerable to attacks. According to analysis by cybersecurity company Barracuda, 94% of industrial organisations have experienced a ...
- Cyber Safety Review Board Releases Unprecedented Report of its Review into Log4j Vulnerabilities and Response
July 14, 2022
WASHINGTON – Today, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released the Cyber Safety Review Board’s (CSRB) first report, which includes 19 actionable recommendations for government and industry. The recommendations from the CSRB – an unprecedented public-private initiative that brings together government and industry leaders to review and assess significant cybersecurity events to better protect ...
- New Lilith ransomware emerges with extortion site, lists first victim
July 13, 2022
A new ransomware operation has been launched under the name ‘Lilith,’ and it has already posted its first victim on a data leak site created to support double-extortion attacks. Lilith is a C/C++ console-based ransomware discovered by JAMESWT and designed for 64-bit versions of Windows. Like most ransomware operations launching today, Lilith performs double-extortions attacks, which ...
- Uncovering a macOS App Sandbox escape vulnerability: A deep dive into CVE-2022-26706
July 13, 2022
Microsoft uncovered a vulnerability in macOS that could allow specially crafted codes to escape the App Sandbox and run unrestricted on the system. We shared these findings with Apple through Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure (CVD) via Microsoft Security Vulnerability Research (MSVR) in October 2021. A fix for this vulnerability, now identified as CVE-2022-26706, was included in ...