Dealing with the aftermath of ransomware attacks is like Russian roulette. Submitting the ransom might seem like it’s the sole option for recovering locked data. But paying the ransom doesn’t mean that your organization will get its affected data back. Let’s not forget that ransomware also continues to evolve as a threat category.

As companies responded to the COVID-19 pandemic with remote work, cybercriminals increased their social engineering and ransomware attack methodologies. Ransomware, malicious code that automatically downloads to a user’s device and locks it from further use, has been rampant since the beginning of March 2020. According to a 2020 report by Bitdefender, ransomware attacks increased by seven times when compared year-over-year to 2019.

Victims of ransomware attacks could potentially receive civil penalties for making ransom payments to a growing list of threat actors. On October 1, the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) revealed that it could choose to impose civil penalties on ransomware victims who make ransom payments to malicious actors whom it has designated under its cyber-related sanctions program.

For many companies it would be a nightmare to discover that they are the latest unwitting victim of a ransomware attack, capable of crippling computer systems and locking up data if a payment isn’t made to cybercriminals. There’s no magic wand that can make a ransomware attack simply disappear with no impact at all on an organisation, but you can lessen the problem by carefully following tried-and-trusted steps in the immediate aftermath of an attack.

Emotet is one of the world’s prolific modular botnets that has several evasive and technical variations up its sleeve. After a brief intermission, Emotet has recently re-emerged using massive malspam campaigns.

Ransomware attacks have become the most common security threat faced by businesses today. A recent report from TrustWave indicates that the number of ransomware attacks quadrupled last year; this type of attack now accounts for more than 20% of all digital security incidents. It’s now more common than even credit card theft.

The second most common type of malware incident is the notorious ransomware attack. According to the Verizon 2020 Data Breach Investigations report, the primary aim of a ransomware attack is “to disrupt operations badly enough and long enough that the organization will pay the ransom.” The average ransom payment in Q2 2020 was a whopping $178,254 — a 60% increase from Q1.

On August 15th the NSA and FBI published a joint security alert containing details about a previously undisclosed Russian malware. The agencies say that the Linux strain malware has been developed and deployed in real-world attacks by Russian military hackers.

GuLoader is a sophisticated malware downloader that stores its payloads in Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive. In addition to using popular cloud apps to evade network-based detection, it uses anti-VM techniques to evade sandbox analysis. Since it was first discovered in December 2019, GuLoader has become one of the top malware delivery mechanisms observed in the wild. It is used by multiple threat actors to deliver a variety of threats, most commonly remote access Trojans (RATs).

While major, multi-million dollar man-in-the-middle attacks have remained under the radar in recent months, spear phishing and social engineering attacks are on the rise as fraudsters continue to take advantage of the uncertainty surrounding COVID-19.