Warning: Ransomware Remains a Top Threat for SMBs
A new report from Sophos found that ransomware attacks accounted for over 90% of incident response cases involving medium-sized businesses in 2024, as well as 70% of cases involving small businesses.
“While the overall number of incidents in 2024 was slightly down—in part because of better defenses and the disruption of some major ransomware-as-a-service operators—ransomware-related crime is not fading away,” Sophos says.
“If anything, the tactics of ransomware actors are evolving to be faster on the attack and more willing to extort the victim over stolen data when they fail to encrypt the victim’s files. Sometimes the attackers don’t even bother trying to encrypt the files.”
The researchers note a 50% increase in the use of ransomware designed to execute from devices that aren’t monitored by technical defenses.
“When attackers do run ransomware, it’s often done from outside of the detection range of endpoint protection software—that is, from an unmanaged device either remotely or directly connected to the targeted network,” the researchers write. “These ‘remote’ ransomware attacks use network file-sharing connections to access and encrypt files on other machines, so the ransomware never executes on them directly. This can conceal the encryption process from malware scans, behavioral detection, and other defenses.”
The report also observed an increase in business email compromise (BEC) attacks, driven by credential phishing attacks that can bypass multi-factor authentication.
“Business email compromise activity is a growing proportion of the overall initial compromises in cybersecurity incidents—leveraged for malware delivery, credential theft, and social engineering for a variety of criminal purposes,” Sophos says. “One of the drivers of business email compromise is the phishing of credentials with adversary-in-the-middle multifactor authentication (MFA) token capture, a constantly evolving threat.”
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Sophos has the story.
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