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- Trend snippet: Despite a decrease in instances ransomware remains the top threat according to cybercrime investigators and the second most prominent threat for the private sector.
Trends in Security Information
The HSD Trendmonitor is designed to provide access to relevant content on various subjects in the safety and security domain, to identify relevant developments and to connect knowledge and organisations. The safety and security domain encompasses a vast number of subjects. Four relevant taxonomies (type of threat or opportunity, victim, source of threat and domain of application) have been constructed in order to visualize all of these subjects. The taxonomies and related category descriptions have been carefully composed according to other taxonomies, European and international standards and our own expertise.
In order to identify safety and security related trends, relevant reports and HSD news articles are continuously scanned, analysed and classified by hand according to the four taxonomies. This results in a wide array of observations, which we call ‘Trend Snippets’. Multiple Trend Snippets combined can provide insights into safety and security trends. The size of the circles shows the relative weight of the topic, the filters can be used to further select the most relevant content for you. If you have an addition, question or remark, drop us a line at info@securitydelta.nl.
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Despite a decrease in instances ransomware remains the top threat according to cybercrime investigators and the second most prominent threat for the private sector.
The majority of private sector reporting indicates that there was
a notable decline in ransomware attacks throughout 20184. This may be attributable to a number of factors: an increased awareness among potential victims — fuelled by industry and law enforcement initiatives to mitigate the threat (such as NoMoreRansom); the increasing use of mobile devices by consumers (with most ransomware targeting Windows-based devices); and a decline in the use of exploit kits (which were a key delivery method).
Last year law enforcement began to see the shift from untargeted, scat- tergun attacks affecting citizen and businesses alike, to more targeted at- tacks. Both European law enforcement and Europol’s private sector partners confirm a diminishing number of ran- somware attacks targeting individual citizens, and more attacks specifically engineered towards individual private and public sectors entities. This is also a likely explanation for the apparent decline in the overall volume of attacks.
While targeting specific companies is potentially more labour-intensive and technically challenging, requiring the attackers to follow the cyber kill-chain , it also means that attackers are able to pitch the ransom for decrypting
the victim’s files based on the victim’s perceived ability to pay. For example, there are cases where a company’s encrypted files have been ransomed for over EUR 1 million.