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:

  • Understanding REvil: REvil Threat Actors May Have Returned (Updated)

    June 3, 2022

    REvil has emerged as one of the world’s most notorious ransomware operators. In summer 2021, it extracted an $11 million payment from the U.S. subsidiary of the world’s largest meatpacking company based in Brazil, demanded $5 million from a Brazilian medical diagnostics company and launched a large-scale attack on dozens, perhaps hundreds, of companies that ...

  • Atlassian Confluence Remote Code Execution Vulnerability (CVE-2022-26134)

    June 3, 2022

    On June 2, Volexity reported that over Memorial Day weekend, they identified suspicious activity on two internet-facing servers running Atlassian’s Confluence Server application. After analysis of the compromise, Volexity determined the initial foothold was the result of a remote code execution vulnerability in Confluence Server and Data Center. The details were reported to Atlassian on ...

  • Novartis says no sensitive data was compromised in cyberattack

    June 3, 2022

    Pharmaceutical giant Novartis says no sensitive data was compromised in a recent cyberattack by the Industrial Spy data-extortion gang. Industrial Spy is a hacking group that runs an extortion marketplace where they sell data stolen from compromised organizations. Yesterday, the hacking group began selling data allegedly stolen from Novartis on their Tor extortion marketplace for $500,000 in ...

  • Healthcare organizations face rising ransomware attacks – and are paying up

    June 3, 2022

    Healthcare organizations, already an attractive target for ransomware given the highly sensitive data they hold, saw such attacks almost double between 2020 and 2021, according to a survey released this week by Sophos. The outfit’s team also found that while polled healthcare orgs are quite likely to pay ransoms, they rarely get all of their data ...

  • WinDealer dealing on the side

    June 2, 2022

    LuoYu is a lesser-known threat actor that has been active since 2008. It primarily goes after targets located in China, such as foreign diplomatic organizations established in the country, members of the academic community, or companies from the defense, logistics and telecommunications sectors. In their initial disclosures on this threat actor, TeamT5 identified three malware ...

  • Exposing POLONIUM activity and infrastructure targeting Israeli organizations

    June 2, 2022

    Microsoft successfully detected and disabled attack activity abusing OneDrive by a previously undocumented Lebanon-based activity group Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC) tracks as POLONIUM. The associated indicators and tactics were used by the OneDrive team to improve detection of attack activity and disable offending actor accounts. To further address this abuse, Microsoft has suspended more ...