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:

  • What To Expect in a Ransomware Negotiation

    October 26, 2021

    We all know the risk of a ransomware attack. Headlines of the latest victims might haunt the dreams of chief information security officers (CISOs) and security operations centers (SOCs) due to the multi-extortion models used by modern ransomware groups. We wanted to get a better understanding of what victims go through during the aftermath and recovery ...

  • Money launderers for Russian hacking groups arrested in Ukraine

    October 26, 2021

    The Ukrainian cybercrime police force has arrested members of a group of money launderers and hackers at the request of U.S. intelligence services. In a press release by Ukraine’s SSU, law enforcement says the individuals engaged in large-scale international operations where they laundered tens of millions of USD for various hacking groups. To engage with their “clients,” ...

  • Kaspersky APT trends report Q3 2021

    October 26, 2021

    The SolarWinds incident reported last December stood out because of the extreme carefulness of the attackers and the high-profile nature of their victims. The evidence suggests that the threat actor behind the attack, DarkHalo (aka Nobelium), had spent six months inside OrionIT’s networks to perfect their attack. In June, more than six months after DarkHalo had ...

  • Almost 100 Organizations in Brazil Targeted with Banking Trojan

    October 26, 2021

    Up to 100 organizations in Brazil have been targeted with a banking Trojan since approximately late August 2021, with the most recent activity seen in early October. This campaign appears to be a continuation of activity that was published about by researchers at ESET in 2020. The attackers appeared to be undeterred by exposure and Symantec, ...

  • NOBELIUM targeting delegated administrative privileges to facilitate broader attacks

    October 25, 2021

    The Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC) has detected nation-state activity associated with the threat actor tracked as NOBELIUM, attempting to gain access to downstream customers of multiple cloud service providers (CSP), managed service providers (MSP), and other IT services organizations (referred to as “service providers” for the rest of this blog) that have been granted ...

  • Ransomware: Industrial services top the hit list – but cyber criminals are diversifying

    October 25, 2021

    Businesses in industrial goods and services are still the most popular target for ransomware attacks, but cyber criminals are increasingly diversifying which organisations they’re extorting. Ransomware has become a major cybersecurity issue, as cyber criminals infiltrate networks and encrypt servers and files before demanding a ransom payment – often amounting to millions of dollars in cryptocurrencies ...