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:

  • Netgear Won’t Patch 45 Router Models Vulnerable to Serious Flaw

    August 4, 2020

    Netgear will not patch 45 router models that are vulnerable to a high-severity remote code execution flaw, the router company revealed last week. However, the company says that routers that won’t receive updates are outdated or have reached EOL (End of Life). The remote code execution vulnerability in question, which was disclosed June 15, allows network-adjacent ...

  • UK: Russian hackers stole trade papers from Liam Fox email

    August 3, 2020

    Documents on UK-US trade talks, leaked ahead of the 2019 general election, were stolen from an email account belonging to Conservative MP Liam Fox, it has emerged. The papers were published online and used by Labour in the 2019 campaign to claim the NHS would be put at risk. The UK government has said Russians almost certainly ...

  • CISA, DOD, FBI expose new versions of Chinese malware strain named Taidoor

    August 3, 2020

    Three agencies of the US government have published today a joint alert alerting US private entities about new versions of Taidoor, a malware family previously associated with Chinese state-sponsored hackers. The alert has been authored by the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (DHS CISA), the Department of Defense’s Cyber Command (CyberCom), and ...

  • GandCrab ransomware distributor arrested in Belarus

    August 3, 2020

    In a press release last week, the Minister of Internal Affairs of Belarus announced the arrest of a 31-year-old man on charges of distributing the GandCrab ransomware. The man, whose name was not released, was arrested in Gomel, a small city in southeastern Belarus, at the intersection with the Russian and Ukraine border. Authorities said the man ...

  • FBI sees surge in online shopping scams, FTC says most reports ever

    August 3, 2020

    The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) today warned of an increased number of reports coming from victims of online shopping scams. The public service announcement, published on the agency’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), says that the scam victims report that they found the scammers’ websites either via direct searches on popular web search engines ...

  • Take a “NetWalk” on the Wild Side

    August 3, 2020

    The NetWalker ransomware, initially known as Mailto, was first detected in August 2019. Since then, new variants were discovered throughout 2019 and the beginning of 2020, with a strong uptick noticed in March of this year. NetWalker has noticeably evolved to a more stable and robust ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) model, and our research suggests that the malware ...