The Ransomware as a Provider (RaaS) landscape underwent an additional main change in the third quarter as new variants emerged to become the dominant players in the ecosystem, in accordance to Intel 471.
In a new update, the threat intelligence business spelled out that 60% of the attacks it tracked during the interval ended up tied back to four variants: LockBit 2., Conti, BlackMatter and Hive.
Of these, LockBit 2. was the most prolific, accounting for a third (33%) of observed attacks, adopted by Conti (15%), BlackMatter (7%) and Hive (6%).
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“Be it owing to legislation enforcement, infighting among teams or folks abandoning variants completely, the RaaS teams dominating the ecosystem at this level in time are wholly different than just a couple months ago,” said Intel 471.
“Yet, even with the shift in variants, ransomware incidents as a whole are nevertheless on the rise. From July to September 2021, Intel 471 noticed 612 ransomware attacks that can be attributed to 35 distinctive ransomware variants. Amongst all those attacks, various lesser-recognized variants have supplanted outstanding ones that rose in notoriety over the first 50 percent of 2021.”
LockBit 2.0’s increase has been significantly noteworthy, as it was only learned in June 2021 following the disappearance of LockBit late very last 12 months. Its most famed scalp so far has been Accenture, which it bombarded with a DDoS attack as well as leaking knowledge in a bid to pressure a $50m ransom payment.
Conti has been beset by in-fighting which could have led to a 64% drop in the number of recorded attacks working with the variant concerning Q2 and Q3 2021.
“In August, an actor leaked teaching documents and exposed some infrastructure that uncovered two other actors’ roles in managing the variant, allegedly due to the operators not shelling out network accessibility brokers their slash of ransom payments,” explained Intel 471.
“The initial actor and one of the doxxed actors had been booted from the discussion board after being tied to ransomware functions.”
Even though the 4 pointed out variants are on the increase, Clop and REvil have fallen absent immediately after considerable legislation enforcement disruption.
Nonetheless, the concept to defenders is that the danger will persist as very long as victims carry on to spend up and hostile nations shelter attackers. That makes proactive menace protection a should.
This week, news emerged that the new Log4j vulnerability is now currently being exploited in ransomware attacks, giving a harmful new vector for risk actors.
Some areas of this short article are sourced from:
www.infosecurity-journal.com