Quote:Ransomware has seen a significant uptick so far in 2021, with global attack volume increasing by 151 percent for the first six months of the year as compared with the year-ago half. Meanwhile, the FBI has warned that there are now 100 different strains circulating around the world.
 
From a hard-number perspective, the ransomware scourge hit a staggering 304.7 million attempted attacks within SonicWall Capture Labs’ telemetry. To put that in perspective, the firm logged 304.6 million ransomware attempts for the entirety of 2020.
 
The top three ransomware strains seen in the wild by the firm are Ryuk, Cerber and SamSam, according to a recent mid-year report from SonicWall.
 
In terms of the three most common types of ransomware, SonicWall researchers recorded 93.9 million instances of Ryuk in the first half, catapulting it to the No. 1 position – a number that’s triple the number of Ryuk attempts seen in the first six months of 2020.
 
Meanwhile, researchers also saw Cerber used in 52.5 million recorded hits in the first half of 2021. Researchers said that Cerber is definitely on the rise; the number of attacks nearly quadrupled in April, and by May it had risen to nearly five times the levels seen in January.
 
And finally, there were 49.7 million recorded instances of SamSam in SonicWall’s numbers for the first half — more than double the volume seen during the entire year of 2020. June alone saw 15.7 million hits, researchers said, which is more than two-thirds of the 23.5 million SamSam hits seen for all of last year.