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:

  • NSA Urgently Warns on Industrial Cyberattacks, Triconex Critical Bug

    July 24, 2020

    The U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) have issued an alert warning that adversaries could be targeting critical infrastructure across the U.S. Separately, ICS-CERT issued an advisory on a critical security bug in the Schneider Electric Triconex TriStation and Tricon Communication Module. These safety instrumented system (SIS) controllers are ...

  • OilRig Targets Middle Eastern Telecom Organization and Adds Novel C2 Channel with Steganography to Its Inventory

    July 22, 2020

    While analyzing an attack against a Middle Eastern telecommunications organization, Unit 42 has discovered a variant of an OilRig-associated tool we call RDAT using a novel email-based command and control (C2) channel that relied on a technique known as steganography to hide commands and data within bitmap images attached to emails. In May 2020, Symantec published ...

  • MATA: Multi-platform targeted malware framework

    July 22, 2020

    As the IT and OT environment becomes more complex, adversaries are quick to adapt their attack strategy. For example, as users’ work environments diversify, adversaries are busy acquiring the TTPs to infiltrate systems. Recently, we reported to our Threat Intelligence Portal customers a similar malware framework that internally we called MATA. The MATA malware framework ...

  • Going Down the Spyware Rabbit Hole with SilkBean Mobile Malware

    July 22, 2020

    An Android spyware attack was recently discovered that targeted the Uyghur ethnic minority group – since 2013. In this in-depth Threatpost podcast Christoph Hebeisen, who leads the Security Intelligence Research Division at Lookout, shares a behind-the-scenes look at how his team discovered and tracked three never-before-seen surveillanceware tools, dubbed SilkBean, GoldenEagle and CarbonSteal. Read more… Source: ThreatPost  

  • Threat Brief: Microsoft DNS Server Wormable Vulnerability CVE-2020-1350

    July 21, 2020

    In July 2020, Microsoft released a security update, CVE-2020-1350 | Windows DNS Server Remote Code Execution Vulnerability, for a new remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability. This vulnerability exists within the Microsoft Windows Domain Name System (DNS) Server due to the improper handling of certain types of requests, specifically over port 53/TCP. Exploitation of this vulnerability is ...

  • Hacker Infrastructure And Underground Hosting 101

    July 21, 2020

    In the cybercrime underground, a criminal’s hosting infrastructure serves as the foundation of their entire business model. It hosts anonymizing services for keeping their activities private, command-and-control (C&C) servers for taking advantage of victims’ machines, and discussion forums for communicating with other criminals. Criminal sellers provide services and infrastructures that other criminals need to execute ...