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:
- N3TW0RM ransomware emerges in wave of cyberattacks in Israel
May 3, 2021
A new ransomware gang known as ‘N3TW0RM’ is targeting Israeli companies in a wave of cyberattacks starting last week. Israeli media Haaretz reported that at least four Israeli companies and one nonprofit organization had been successfully breached in this wave of attacks. Read more… Source: Bleeping Computer
- San Diego: Scripps Health Cyberattack Causes Widespread Hospital Outages
May 3, 2021
Scripps Health, a hospital network based in San Diego, was hit by a cyberattack over the weekend, forcing some critical-care patients to be diverted, according to the San Diego Union-Tribune. Scripps acknowledged the attack in a statement but didn’t specify whether it was a ransomware incident. It’s also unknown whether the adversaries compromised any patient records ...
- New Buer Malware Downloader Rewritten in E-Z Rust Language
May 3, 2021
A variant of the Buer malware, which is being distributed in emails disguised as DHL support shipping notices, comes with a fresh code rewrite in the popular Rust language and looks like it may be in the process of prepping for rental to other cybercrooks. Using the increasingly popular, efficient and easy-to-use Rust programming language will ...
- Hewlett Packard Enterprise Plugs Critical Bug in Edge Platform Tool
May 3, 2021
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is urging customers to patch one of its premier edge application management tools that could allow an attacker to carry out a remote authentication bypass attack and infiltrate a customer’s cloud infrastructure. Rated critical, with a CVSS score of 9.8, the bug impacts all versions of HPE’s Edgeline Infrastructure Manager (EIM) prior ...
- Suspected Chinese state hackers target Russian submarine designer
April 30, 2021
Hackers suspected to work for the Chinese government have used a new malware called PortDoor to infiltrate the systems of an engineering company that designs submarines for the Russian Navy. They used a spear-phishing email specifically crafted to lure the general director of the company into opening a malicious document. The threat actor targeted Rubin Central Design ...
- Microsoft finds memory allocation holes in range of IoT and industrial technology
April 30, 2021
The security research group for Azure Defender for IoT, dubbed Section 52, has found a batch of bad memory allocation operations in code used in Internet of Things and operational technology (OT) such as industrial control systems that could lead to malicious code execution. Given the trendy vulnerability name of BadAlloc, the vulnerabilities are related to ...