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:

  • New TsuNAME DNS bug allows attackers to DDoS authoritative DNS servers

    May 6, 2021

    Attackers can use a newly disclosed domain name server (DNS) vulnerability publicly known as TsuNAME as an amplification vector in large-scale reflection-based distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks targeting authoritative DNS servers. In simpler terms, authoritative DNS servers translate web domains to IP addresses and pass this info to recursive DNS servers that get queried by ...

  • Operation TunnelSnake

    May 6, 2021

    Formerly unknown rootkit used to secretly control networks of regional organizations Windows rootkits, especially those operating in kernel space, are pieces of malware infamous for their near absolute power in the operating system. Usually deployed as drivers, such implants have high privileges in the system, allowing them to intercept and potentially tamper with core I/O operations ...

  • Hundreds of Millions of Dell Users at Risk from Kernel-Privilege Bugs

    May 5, 2021

    Five high-severity security flaws in Dell’s firmware update driver are impacting potentially hundreds of millions of Dell desktops, laptops, notebooks and tablets, researchers said. The bugs have gone undisclosed for 12 years, and could allow the ability to bypass security products, execute code and pivot to other parts of the network for lateral movement, according to ...

  • The UNC2529 Triple Double: A Trifecta Phishing Campaign

    May 4, 2021

    In December 2020, Mandiant observed a widespread, global phishing campaign targeting numerous organizations across an array of industries. Mandiant tracks this threat actor as UNC2529. Based on the considerable infrastructure employed, tailored phishing lures and the professionally coded sophistication of the malware, this threat actor appears experienced and well resourced. This blog post will discuss the ...

  • Spam and phishing in Q1 2021

    May 3, 2021

    In Q1 2021, new banking scams appeared alongside ones that are more traditional. Clients of several Dutch banks faced a phishing attack using QR codes. The fraudsters invited the victim to scan a QR code in an email, ostensibly to unblock mobile banking. In actual fact, scanning the code resulted in a data leak, money ...

  • PoC exploit released for Microsoft Exchange bug dicovered by NSA

    May 3, 2021

    Technical documentation and proof-of-concept exploit (PoC) code is available for a high-severity vulnerability in Microsoft Exchange Server that could let remote attackers execute code on unpatched machines. The flaw is for one of the four that the National Security Agency (NSA) reported to Microsoft and received a fix in April. Read more… Source: Bleeping Computer