Victims are mostly paying up when faced with a ransomware technique known as “double extortion,” where hackers threaten to leak any stolen company information from the attack unless the company pays up, says Drew Schmitt, an analyst at cyber consulting firm GuidePoint Security.Crypto is still hackers’ best bet for pseudonymous transactions, and volatility has yet to dissuade them from relying on the currencies for payment.
Ransomware gangs only rely on crypto for anonymity and easy money laundering — not because they see crypto as a great investment — so the exact price of bitcoin doesn't matter much to them. Chester Wisniewski, a principal research scientist at Sophos, says that before the crypto crash, hackers were already expecting to either lose or gain 10% during the weeks it takes them to launder ransom funds through crypto exchanges.Experts who help companies navigate these attacks have limited information on the broader ransomware ecosystem and whether it is truly on the decline or seeing an upswing.
One example: It took analysts at least a year to determine that hackers’ double-extortion technique was a permanent fixture in their attacks, Wisniewski says.But defenses like implementing two-factor authentication, limiting access to sensitive company files to a small group of employees, and reporting phishing emails all make ransomware attacks much harder to pull off.
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