Quote:Two reports slap hard figures on what’s already crystal clear: Ransomware attacks have skyrocketed, and ransomware payments are the comet trails that have followed them skyward.
 
The average ransomware payment spiked 82 percent year over year: It’s now over half a million dollars, according to the first-half 2021 update report put out by Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42. As far as the sheer multitude of attacks goes, Barracuda researchers on Thursday reported that they’ve identified and analyzed 121 ransomware incidents so far in 2021, a 64 percent increase in attacks, year-over-year.

What’s helped to intensify extortion payments is the fact that cybercriminals have been pouring money into “highly profitable ransomware operations,” Unit 42 researchers wrote, including a new, disturbing trend: The rise of “quadruple extortion.”

Double extortion has been around for more than a year: That’s when threat actors not only paralyze a victim’s systems and/or data but also threaten to leak compromised data or use it in future spam attacks if victims balk at paying extortion demands.
 
But during the first half of 2021, Unit 42 researchers observed ransomware groups commonly using as many as four techniques to turn the thumbscrews on victims, adding denial-of-service (DoS) attacks and harassment of a victim’s connections to the pain:

1. Encryption: Victims pay to regain access to scrambled data and compromised computer systems that stop working because key files are encrypted.
   
2. Data Theft: Hackers release sensitive information if a ransom is not paid.
   
3. DoS: Ransomware gangs launch DoS attacks that shut down a victim’s public websites.
   
4. Harassment: Cybercriminals contact customers, business partners, employees and media to tell them the organization was hacked.