Why Ransomware Attacks Are So Effective And Frequent Nowadays?

We all are familiar with the dangerous impact of Ransomware but does anyone know why the Ransomware attacks are so effective and successful?

The right answer to this question will certainly help you to prevent yourself from Ransomware attacks. And that’s all we want? Isn’t it…?

That’s why our today’s blog is specifically written with the main objective to explain you “why Ransomware attacks are so effective”.

According to the Raimund Genes, CTO at Trend Micro “Ransomware attacks are surging because attackers have perfected their techniques while enterprises in all sectors have failed to address critical security shortcomings”.

Ransomware is a popular malware attack among cyber-thieves because of its highly untraceable and lucrative properties. But through the right knowledge of what reasons are actually making the Ransomware so effective; it’s become too easy to prevent your crucial data and device away from the Ransomware attack.

 So, let’s start knowing why Ransomware attacks are so effective….!

Why Ransomware Attacks Are So Effective?

Take a quick glance over the reason why Ransomware attacks are becoming so effective and popular nowadays.

1. Lack Of User Awareness
2. Quick Agree For Ransom Payment
3. Not Enough Protection
4. Ransomware Spreading Techniques
5. Your Weakness/Mistakes Make Profit For Cybercriminals
6. Weak Endpoints
7. Having No Plan And Policies
8. Blackmail Over The Internet
9. Associated Dangers Of Ransomware

1. Lack Of User Awareness:

Most of the Ransomware attacks get success because of the lack of knowledge of the victim. Simply users don’t know about the threat, its impact, or the ransom they have to pay to get rid of the Ransomware infection.

Right and complete Knowledge of the areas where to check for the malware and how to prevent Ransomware attack is important.

Lack of knowledge fails to detect the Ransomware threat at the right time and blocking it from further damage to your device.

2. Quick Agree For Ransom Payment:

Most of the Ransomware attack victims consider this malware spreading techniques most devastating and awful. Thus their huge fear of losing data forces them to fulfill the hacker’s demand. Victims are ready to pay the ransom because they think they will get their data back without any harm.

But the fact is the idea of paying ransom money not always get success. In most cases, it is found that after getting the money hackers have no such intentions to take pity on you. They even don’t care about what to do with your data.

Regarding this, the only thing we want to say is don’t pay the ransom. This encourages the attackers to continue with their bad deeds.

3. Not Enough Protection:

The main reason behind the success rate of Ransomware attack is not having enough protection for blocking and preventing off unauthorized access.

Every organization needs to follow more cautious about its accessing. Moreover, follow precautions while doing internet surfing and handling their message inbox.

Apart from this, there are several blogs and articles present online that guide you on how to stay protected from Ransomware. So you can follow their tips too.

4. Ransomware Spreading Techniques:

Ransomware attackers frequently alter their style and always follow some new techniques to replicate the damage.

Recently it is seen that Ransomware like WannaCry uses unpatched vulnerabilities within the Windows SMB service for spreading throughout the network. Mainly those who all have SMB opened to the internet.

This technique is adopted from Windows malware such as Sasser.

It is also found that malware developers always try new techniques for injecting malicious code into the Microsoft Office.

In the past year, the threat that comes from the malicious macros in the Office documents is a very trending technique. But now a day’s usage of Microsoft protocol named Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE) for executing malicious code is in trend.

Apart from the macro-based attacks, in the DDE attack victim doesn’t get any pop-up warning message. In such cases, exploitation is much more effective and successful.

Malware creators are making more benefits from technological advances. Their improved writing, genuine appearing email presentations & concrete social engineering tactics are also the reason behind the increase of Ransomware success rate.

5. Your Weakness/Mistakes Make Profit For Cybercriminals:

We are only the one who makes the problem bigger and cybercriminals take profit of such. Check out what mistakes or weaknesses we have of which attackers are getting benefits.

• A lack of patching – 

The most obvious reason behind the successive Ransomware attack result is the lack of strong security and prevention routines.

To minimize the Ransomware success rate all we need to have solid protection patches for the operating system and system applications. Mainly of those which are targeted by Ransomware developers to achieve Access on your PC.

• Not enough (reliable) backups – 

Updated backup works as the primary and free of cost Ransomware recovery tool. Behind this statement, the reason is very simple; if the backup is available, any victim will obviously choose recovery over the ransom.

Not having sufficient and updated backup will ultimately increase the effectiveness of Ransomware attacks.

• A lack of least privilege–

More the accessing privileges user have, the greater is the scope of a Ransomware attack. Around 71% of the end-users have declared that they can access company data which they shouldn’t be able to see.

The IT department has some serious tasks to make certain that privileges are perfectly locked down.

• No layered defense –

Completely relying on one security solution i.e Antivirus will only protect the organization. Users need solutions like IPS, an email gateway, endpoint protection, etc. to stay protected from a Ransomware attack.

6. Weak Endpoints:

Weak system configuration, mainly in which solid security is not implemented; this gives Ransomware attack to get success.

The secure configuration setting helps in closing the security gaps and limiting up the organization’s threat surface.

CIS benchmarks are the best option for any organization those who all are looking for implementing well-approved and developed configurations.

7. Having No Plan And Policies:

Sudden encountrance of a Ransomware attack can make any professional or newbie user get panic. But if you have a full-proof plan then you can prevent the damage up to some extent at least.

Always be prepared with a perfect plan on how to deal with Ransomware attacks.

If you are in an IT Business then make an incident response plan. This will help your IT security team about what steps they should take during Ransomware attack.

Always include a list of vendors or partners to avoid opening any suspicious emails.

You can try making a company-wide policy. This ultimately helps your employees about what things they need to do if they are having any suspicious mail. It’s like you are forwarding the email to the IT team.

8. Blackmail Over The Internet:

Ransomware malware performs cyber extortion for making financial profits. Attackers hide this malware species under suspicious emails and WebPages.

Nearly about 60% of cases of Ransomware attacks get success through embedded URLs in web pages and emails.

All in all, Ransomware openly blackmails the victim over the internet and this shows its impactful aptitude.

After activation Ransomware prevent user’s to interact with their system, files, and applications until they get the ransom.

Once infected with this Ransomware species, it’s just impossible to regain back your data. This dreadful nature of Ransomware makes it so effective and popular among system users.

9. Associated Dangers Of Ransomware:

The most obvious thing dues to which Ransomware is so effective and popular among people is because of its associated dangers.

• Once the Ransomware gets into the PC, it either locks down the crucial files or prevents the user to use their PC.
• After then the victim gets a ransom message note. This message is an open warning for the victim that if you don’t pay the ransom money then all your compromised data will be released publicly.
• Most of the Ransomware travel from one infected PC to the network hub or connected file server.
• The impact of Ransomware is much faster than the stealthier malware that is used in the advanced threat attack.
• All these dangerous impacts of Ransomware making globally outbreaking Ransomware so effective.

Ransomware Attack Statistics To Show It’s Success Rate

Ransomware is the 2nd Biggest Cybersecurity Threat in Retail

In the retail business, Ransomware is 2^nd largest cybersecurity threat. Retail businesses keep huge databases of customer’s information. For this task retail business owners are always thankful for data breach laws & EU’s GDPR regulations.

So, they can’t afford to lose it….!

Most Affected Industry By Ransomware Attack

• Healthcare Industry:

As per the survey, it is found that 47% of businesses are till now affected by the Ransomware attack. Out of this, the healthcare industry is the most targeted one which is compromised by around 46% of the population. Whereas, around 12% of the professional services and financial industries are also affected by Ransomware.

For the Ransomware attackers Healthcare industry is amongst the logical choice because such industry contains so much sensitive information.

Data loss in the health industry is very expensive and the victim has to pay a huge compensation for it. The disturbance in inpatient care due to the locked network is counted as malpractice lawsuits.

• More than half of 100%, Ransomware incidents are reported in 2018 are of healthcare companies.
• From the year 2017-2018, Approx 90% of healthcare industries saw a rise in Ransomware attack success rate.
• Around 18% of healthcare devices are targeted by viruses.
• From the report of CSO online, it is estimated that healthcare-associated virus attack will quadruple by 2020.

• Financial Institutions:

About 90% of financial institutions have rendered with Ransomware attacks in the few past years.

The reason behind the Ransomware attack in these Financial Institutions is that it contains a virtual trove of bank account numbers, social security numbers, routing numbers, etc. Hackers get these details easily and after then sell it on the dark web.

• More than 204,448 people have already gone through this situation where a third party tries to log-in to their banking account.
• The numbers of malicious URLs found are More than 280,000,000 URLs.
• Ransomware attacks on Business industries rise to one every 40 seconds.

Windows Is Still The Most Targeted System

Around 90% percent of {MSP} multiple service providers count Windows operating system as the most affected OS in a Ransomware attack.

This doesn’t mean that OS X, Linux, and Android devices are completely secure. Any OS can be a victim of a Ransomware attack.

SaaS Applications are Also Affected by Ransomware

One very popular software service application named SaaS are highly used for executing Ransomware attack.

After a complete survey on numerous multiple service providers, it is found that Azure, Dropbox, Amazon Web Services, Office 365 and G Suite have also caught with this Ransomware attacks in different ways.

Ransomware Attacks Success Rates

• According to the cybersecurity Ventures, in the year 2019, after every 14 seconds, a new organization gets trapped into a Ransomware attack. Whereas, in the year 2021, the attack will be executed after every 11 seconds.
• Around 1.5 million freshly designed phishing sites created every month.
• Ransomware attack rate raised to 97% in the last 2 years.
• Around 850.97 million Ransomware attack cases were found in the year 2018.
• In the year 2019, Ransomware attacks from phishing mail raise by 109% as compared to 2017.

Statistics Of Ransom Demands In Ransomware Attack

Statistics Of Ransom Demands In Ransomware Attack show that hackers are more focusing on large businesses that can easily afford to pay for retrieving up their data.

• From IBM studies it is concluded that over a quarter of companies pay more than $20,000 to attackers for retrieving up their encrypted data.
• Every year through these Ransomware attacks hackers make around $25 million of income.
• In the year 2017, the ransom demand in the NotPetya Ransomware attack is FedEx $300 million.
• In the year 2018, the average ransom demand raised is $1,077.
• 10% of ransom money demands in the attack are more than $5,000.
• Around 97% of United States companies deny paying the ransom. Whereas, 77% of Canadian companies, 22% of German companies, and 42% in the UK companies have paid it.

Future Of Ransomware Attacks

Here are a few predictions that are done for the Ransomware attack success rate in the coming years.

• Cybersecurity Ventures has predicted that by the year 2021 Ransomware will cost $6 trillion annually.
• As per the prediction of McAfee some frequent Ransomware targets will degrade.
• As per the prediction of Palo Alto Networks people will render a sudden increase in Mac Ransomware.
• MIT makes a prediction for cloud computing industries that in the year 2020 Ransomware attacks will affect their businesses too.
• As per the RSA Security, future assumption of this fastest-growing threat is not limited to encryption of system and documents; but it also gets shifted to accounts and networks.

Wrap Up:

Ransomware attack methods are very common in headlines and unluckily it is not going away.

Popular Ransomware types like a bad rabbit, Petya, WannaCrypt, NotPetya, etc. are now like global outbreaks. Complexity and attack frequency of such Ransomware make people think why Ransomware is so effective.

After reading this post you must have got the right answer to this question. So, take all the above-mentioned points on a serious note and strictly avoid yourself from doing such mistakes.