GOOGLE REPORT – RANSOMWARE – INDIA 6th

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GOOGLE REPORT – RANSOMWARE – INDIA 6th

In our day-to-day discussion, ransomware is not a topic in this country, it is dubbed as an alien phenomenon, to the extent that figures are also not readily available. Since the WannaCry days, we remain in the state of denial. During WannaCry India was the third most infected, with over 40,000 computers impacted. Lack of data does not mean the issue is not there. How will it help if the whole world is plagued with it? Accepting the disease is the first response to it. Investigation the second, bringing the knowledge and expertise together is the next. Negation can be criminal. Given the cases of Colonial Pipelines and JBS in the recent past, we cannot be moving in the wild in the fond hope of not being attacked.

Now there is another warning for the naysayers. As per Google, India is the 6th most infected country by ransomware. The report is based on 80 million ransomware samples over the last 18 months, a golden period for ransomware gangs, has revealed that India is at the sixth place in a list of 140 countries, which have faced the brunt of the ransomware attack. Might be we are unaware of the fact, that ransomware can have a debilitating impact on the economy. In today’s day and age, if your data is held in ransom, how can you run your business. Israel saw a 600 per cent increase in the number of submissions, the highest in the list.

For the Cyber Security professionals across the world, the omen is crystal clear. Israel was followed by South Korea, Vietnam, China, Singapore, India, Kazakhstan, Philippines, Iran and UK as the most affected top ten territories. The submissions are handled / analyzed by VirusTotal, now owned by Chronicle Security, a cybersecurity company which is a part of Google Cloud Platform. From the earlier norm of demanding ransom for decrypting the hostage data, the ransomware attackers now threaten to reveal sensitive information or valuable information if the companies don’t pay or if they try and contact the police. Ransomware activity peaked in the first two quarters of 2020, mainly due to ransomware-as-a service group GandCrab. This is very damaging trend towards crash commercialization of ransomware attacks.  

There were at least 130 different families active in 2020 and early 2021. This has been concluded by the grouping of 30,000 clusters of malware that looked and operated in a similar fashion. The purpose of the report is ”to help researchers, security practitioners and the general public to understand* the nature of ransomware attacks while enabling *cyber professionals to better analyze suspicious files, URLs, domains and IP addresses. Research is the need of the hour in this highly technical field and we are completely missing out on it. We can at least gain out of world knowledge and expertise. At the global level research collaboration and sharing of information can only help us in this already losing battle.

RISE TO THE CHALLENGE POSED BY RANSOMWARE BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE.

Sanjay Sahay

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